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\' 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 




PRESIDENT WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING 



BEHIND THE 
MIRRORS 

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DISINTEGRATION 
AT WASHINGTON 



By the Author of 
**The Mirrors of Washington** 

Le mdtier superieur de la critique, ce 
n'est pas mfime, comme le proclamait 
Pierre Bayle, de semer des doubtes; 
il faut aller plus loin, il faut d^tiuire. 
De Gourmont 



ILLUSTRATED 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 

NEW YORK AND LONDON 

Zbc Iknfcherbocher ipress 

1922 






Copyright, 1922 

by 

G. P. Putnam's Sons 

Made in the United States of America 



^xox^^l^ 



\ '*■ 



-O^ 




FOREWORD 

"A BOOK like the Mirrors of Downing Street is 
well enough. It is the fashion to be interested in 
English notables. But that sort of thing won't do 
here. The American public gets in the newspapers 
all it wants about our national politicians. That 
isn't book material." 

An editor said that just a year ago when we told 
him of the plan for the Mirrors of Washington. 
And, frankly, it seemed doubtful whether readers 
generally cared enough about our national political 
personalities to buy a book exclusively concerned 
with them. 

But they did. The Mirrors of Washington be- 
came an instantaneous success. It commanded 
almost unprecedented attention. It was heartily 
damned and vociferously welcomed. By the 
averagely curious citizen, eager for insight behind 
the gilded curtains of press-agentry and partisan- 
ship, it was hailed as a shaft of common-sense 
sunlight thrown into a clay-footed wilderness of 
political pap. And close to one hundred thousand 
copies were absorbed by a public evidently genu- 
inely interested in an uncensored analysis of the 

iii 



FOREWORD 

people who are running us, or ruining us, as in- 
dividual viewpoint may determine. 

The Mirrors of Washington was by way of being 
a pioneer, at least for America. Overseas, it is 
habitual enough to exhibit beneath the Hterary 
microscope the politically great and near-great, 
and even to dissect them — often enough without 
anaesthesia. To our mind, such critical examina- 
tion is healthily desirable. Here in America, we 
are case-hardened to the newspapers, whose ap- 
praisal of political personages is, after all, pretty 
well confined to the periods of pre-election cam- 
paigning. And we are precious little influenced by 
this sort of thing ; the pro papers are so pro, and the 
anti papers so anti, that few try to determine how 
much to believe and how much to dismiss as routine 
partisan prevarication. 

But a book! Political criticism, and personality 
analyses, frozen into the so-permanently-appearing 
dignity of a printed volume — that is something else 
again! Even a politician who dismisses with a 
smile or a shrug recurrent discompliments in the 
news columns or the anonymous editorial pages of 
the press, is tempted to burst into angry protest 
when far less bitter, far more balanced criticism of 
himself is voiced in a book. A phenomenon, that, 
doubtless revisable as time goes on and the re- 
flections of more book-bound Mirrors brighten the 
eyes of those who read and jangle the nerves of 
those who run — for office. 

iv 



FOREWORD 

Behind the Mirrors is another such book. It 
delves into the fundamentals at Washington. It is 
concerned with political tendencies as well as 
political personalities. It presents what impresses 
us as a genuinely useful and brilliant picture of 
present-day governmental psychology and function- 
ing. It is a cross section of things as they are. 

The picture behind the mirrors is not as pretty 
as it might be. Probably the way to make it 
prettier is to let ample light in upon it so that the 
blemishes, discerned, may be rectified; and to im- 
press those responsible for its rehabilitation with 
the necessity of taking advantage of the oppor- 
tunities that are theirs. 

When President Eliot of Harvard presented to a 
certain Senator an honorary degree, he described 
with inimitable charm and considerable detail 
that Senator's literary achievements; and then he 
mentioned his political activities, ending with sub- 
stantially these words: "A man with great oppor- 
ttmities for public service still inviting him. " 

The invitation yet holds good. Acceptances 
are still in order. 

G. P. P. 

New York, 
June, 1922. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. — President Harding and the Clock. God's 
Time as it was in the American Politi- 
cal Consciousness .... 3 

II. — God's Time as it is; an Ingersoll that 

Requires Much Winding . . .21 

III. — Golden Words Turn to Brass ... 36 

IV. — The Super-President Goes Down in the 

General Smash ..... 61 

V. — Looking for Ultimate Wisdom — in the 

Bosom of Therese .... 80 

VI. — Shall We Find our Salvati Sitting, Like 

Mr. Mellon, on a Pile of DoLii^Rs , loi 

VII. — The Bottle Neck of thi ^abi .r, and 

What is IN THE Bottle . . .119 

VIII. — The Greatest Common Divisor of Much 

Littleness ...... 142 

IX. — Congress at Last with Something to Do 

has no one to Do it . . . . 156 

vii 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

X. — Interlude, Introducing a Few Members 
OF THE Upper House Booboisie and 
Some Others 1 73 

XI. — A Peak of Reality Thrusts up on the 

Level Plain of Shams . . .204 

XII. — The Happy Ending 226 



viu 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

President Warren Gamaliel Harding 

Frontispiece 

Uncle Sam's Conference 26 

Representative Frank W. Mondell of Wyoming 44 

Lord Riddell ....... 96 

Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury 112 

Arthur Balfour 130 

Attorney-General H. M. Daugherty . .138 

Senator James E. Watson of Indiana . .160 

Representative Frederick H. Gillett of Massa- 
chusetts 166 

Senator Joseph S. Frelinghuysen of New 

Jersey ....... 180 

Senator Harry S. New of Indiana . . .188 

Senator James W. Wadsworth of New York . 190 

Senator William M. Calder of New York . 192 

Senator Arthur I. Capper of Kansas . .216 

Gray Silver, the Man Behind the Farm Bloc 222 



IX 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

CHAPTER I 

PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK. GOD's TIME 

AS IT WAS IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL 

CONSCIOUSNESS 

President Harding had recently to decide the 
momentous question whether we should have 
daylight saving in Washington. He decided it in 
a perfectly characteristic way, perfectly charac- 
teristic of himself and of our present political 
division and unsureness. He ruled that the city 
should go to work and quit work an hour earlier, 
but that it should not turn back the hands of the 
clock, should not lay an impious finger upon God's 
Time. 

That this straddle is typical of our President 
needs no argument — he "has to be so careful," 
as he once pathetically said — but that it is sympto- 
matic of the present American political conscious- 
ness perhaps needs elucidation. 

The clock is one of the problems left to us by 

3 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

the Great Wai*, one of the innumerable problems 
thus left to us; it involves our whole attitude 
toward men and things. 

It represents, rather literally, Mechanism. In 
the war we adopted perforce the creed that man 
was sufficiently master of his ovm. destiny to adapt 
Mechanism to his owii ends; he could lay a pre- 
simiptuous hand tipon God's Time. But in peace 
sliall he go on thus boldl}"? Or shall he revert to 
the good old days, the days of McKinley, when the 
cloci: was sacred? Thiiik of all the happiness, all 
the prosperity, that was ours, all the duty done 
and all the destin^^ abimdantly realized, before man 
thought to la}' a hand upon the clock ! 

The question what the limits to human govern- 
ment are is involved. What may man attempt for 
himself and what should he leave to the great 
iMechanism which has, upon the whole, run the 
world so well, to the Sun in its courses, to progress, 
to ine^•it ability? After all the clock was in the 
beginning, is now and ever shall be — unless we 
meddle with it — and before its cheerful face 
America was built from a wilderness into a vast 
nation, creating wealth, so as to be the third his- 
toric wonder of the ages — the glory that was 
Greece, the grandeur that was Rome, the doDars 
that are America. 

And not only are we di\'ided as to the limits of 
government, but where shall Mr. Harding look for 
authority to guide liim with respect to clocks? 

4 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

To his party? This is a party government, you 
remember. But his party speaks with no clear 
voice about clocks or about anything else. To 
business? Business has only one rule — more 
clocks in government and less government in 
clocks. But business bows to the public. To 
public opinion then? The public is divided about 
clocks; we tend to grow class conscious about 
clocks. And clamorously amid all these authori- 
ties is heard the voice of the Farm Bloc exclaiming: 
"Don't touch God's Time." 

So it is decided that Washington may save day- 
light and save the clock too, a double saving, a 
most happy compromise. If all questions touch- 
ing Mechanism could only be solved in the direction 
of such splendid economies! 

I listened a year ago to a most unusual Fourth 
of July oration. The speaker, like most of us in 
this period of break-up following the Great War, 
was rather bewildered. He had, moreover, his 
private reasons for feeling that life was not easily 
construed. An illness, perhaps mortal, afflicted 
him. Existence had been unclouded until this 
last cloud came; why was it to end suddenly and 
without reason? He had gone through the Great 
War a follower of Mr. Wilson's, to see the world 
scofQng at the passionate faith it had professed a 
few months before and sneering at the leaders it 
had then exalted. He had echoing in his mind the 
fine war phrases, "Brotherhood of Man," "War 

5 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

to End War, " "We must be just even to those to 
whom we do not wish to be just." Then some 
monstrous hand had turned the page and there was 
Harding, just as in his own hfe all success at the 
bar and in politics, and the joy of being lord of a 
vast coimtry estate that had been patented in his 
family since colonial times, had suddenly come to 
an end; the page had turned. 

So this is what he said, in a voice that rose not 
much above a whisper, "I have told them where to 
dig a hole and put me, out here on my pleasant 
place. I don't know what it means. I don't 
believe it has any meaning. The only thing to do 
is to laugh. You have trouble laughing? Look 
about ^''ou and you will find plenty to laugh at. 
Look at your President and laugh. Look at your 
Supreme Court and laugh. Not one of them knows 
whether he is coming or going. Everything for the 
moment has lost its meaning for everyone. If you 
can't laugh at anything else, just think how many 
angels there are who are blank blanks and how 
many blank blanks there are who are angels . . . 
and laugh." 

The Comic Spirit looking down from some cool 
distance sees something like what this lawyer saw. 
It sees President Harding and the Ku Klux Klan. 
The connection between President Harding and the 
Ku Klux Klan? The Comic Spirit, perceiving 
everything, perceives that too. For it Mr. Harding 
is but the pious manifestation of a sentiment of 

6 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

which the Ku Klux Klan is the unconscious and 
serviceable parody, that instinctive rush of a people 
with the world breaking up about it, to seek 
safety in the past. Men always shrink thus back- 
ward when facing an uncertain future, just as in 
moments of great peril they become children again, 
call "Mother!" and revert to early practices at 
her knee. It is one of the most intelligent things 
the human race ever does. It is looking before 
you leap: the race has no choice but to leap; it 
draws back to solid ground in the past for a better 
take-off into the future. Mr. Harding represents 
solid ground, McKinley and the blessed nineties, 
the days before men raised a presumptuous hand 
against the clock. 

If utterly in earnest and determined to revive 
that happy period, you clothe yourself in that 
garment which evokes the assured past, the blessed 
nineties, the long white night shirt ; the long white 
night shirt supplemented by the black mask and 
the tar brush shall surely save you. 

The Comic Spirit looking about largely, like our 
Fourth of July orator, sees in Mr. Harding a wise 
shrinking into the safety of the past and in Mr. 
William H. Taft, our new Chief Justice of the Su- 
preme Court, at once a regard for the past and an eye 
for the future. Can anyone tell whether Mr. Justice 
Taft is coming or going, as this Fourth of July 
speaker asked? He comes and he goes, and like 
the wind man knows not whence he cometh or 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

whither he goeth. He is forward looking — ^when 
he is not backward looking. Like Zekle, 

" He stands a while on one foot fust, 
Then stands a while on t'other; 
And on which one he feels the yust, 
He can not tell you nuther. ' 

Glance at his public career. He stood upon his 
future foot with Roosevelt, the chosen executor of 
"My Policies." A little later he stands upon his 
past foot, alongside of Aldrich and Cannon, doing 
the works of perdition and bringing on the battle 
of Armageddon. Again you find him standing on 
his future foot beside Mr. Frank P. Walsh in the 
War Labor Board, ranging himself with Mr. Walsh 
in practically all the close decisions. Again you 
see him when all the fine forward looking of the 
war was over, scurrying from the Russian revolu- 
tion as fast as President Wilson or all the rest of us. 
And once more on his future foot with Mr. Wilson 
for the League of Nations and on his past foot with 
President Harding against the League of Nations. 

Let us be Freudian and say that the unconscious 
political self of the whole nation is responsible for 
the selection of Mr. Harding and Mr. Taft. As 
we shrink back into the past we are aware that it is 
for the take-off into the future, and so we have 
Mr. Taft. We both eat our cake and have it in the 
new Chief Justice. 

The United States, like Zekle, is "standing a 

8 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

while on one foot fust, then standing a while on 
t'other, " moving forward or backward. But not 
for long, too large and secure to be permanently 
cautious, with too much well-being to be per- 
manently bold, thinking, but with a certain re- 
straining contempt for thought, instinctive rather 
than intellectual. Vast, eupeptic, assimilative, 
generous, adaptable, the Chief Justice typifies 
the American people in its more permanent char- 
acteristics. 

Mr. Harding as President, Mr. Taft as Chief 
Justice, the agricultural bloc, the enfeebled Con- 
gress, the one million or so Democratic majority 
which becomes in four years a seven-million Re- 
publican majority, are only man^'festations. The 
reality is the man, many millic is strong, whose 
mental state produces the symptoms at Washing- 
ton. It will be profitable to examine the content 
of his mind as it was in those days before momen- 
tous decisions had to be made about daylight 
saving, and as it is today when he hesitates be- 
tween saving daylight and saving the clock, and 
perhaps decides to save both. 

I can not better describe his political conscious- 
ness as it was than by saying that it contained three 
governments — the government of the clock, the 
government of the clock- winders, and the govern- 
ment of those who lived by the clock as religiously 
minded by the clock- winders. It was an orderly 
age, beautifully sure of itself, and the area of these 

9 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

three governments was nicely delimited. There 
was only a small place for the third of these 
governments. 

For the purposes of more common understanding 
I shall sometimes refer to the government of the 
clock as the government of Progress, and the 
government of the clock-winders as the govern- 
ment of business, and to the third government as 
the government at Washington. 

Before the war the American was sure that with 
each tick of the clock the world grew richer and 
better, especially richer. Progress went inevitably 
on and on. It never turned baclcward or rested. 
Its mechanical process relieved man of many 
responsibilities. No one would think of touching 
the mechanism; turning back the hands of the 
clock might rob us of some boon that was intended 
in the beginning whose moment of arrival might 
be lost by interfering with God's Time. 

Born on a continent which only a few years 
before was a wilderness but which now was the 
richest and one of the finest civilizations on the 
earth, the American could not fail to believe in 
progress. The visible evidences of it were on every 
hand. His father had been a poor immigrant seek- 
ing the mere chance to live ; he was a farmer pos- 
sessed of many acres, a business man who had an 
increasing income already in five figures, a rising 
young attorney, or physician. Even from genera- 
tion to generation everything got better. 

10 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

The past had had its unhappy moments. The 
American looked back at the past mainly to 
measure how far he had come and to guess how 
far moving forward at a geometrical ratio of in- 
creased speed he would go in the not distant future. 
History flattered him. 

Before his eyes went on the steady conquest 
over Nature, or perhaps it is better to say, the 
steady surrender of Nature. Always there were 
new discoveries of science. Always there were new 
inventions. Forces which a little while ago were 
beyond control, whose existence even was un- 
suspected, were harnessed to everyday uses. He 
saw progress in statistics. Things which were 
reckoned in millions began to be reckoned in 
himdreds of millions, began to be reckoned in 
billions. We loved to read the long figures where, 
in the pleasing extension of ciphers, wealth grew, 
debts grew — even debts were a source of pride 
before they called for income taxes to meet the 
annual payments upon them. 

Progress w^ould never stop. Tomorrow we 
should set the sun's rays to some more practical 
use than making the earth green and pleasant to 
look at and its fruits good to eat. We should 
employ them like the waters of Niagara Falls, to 
turn the wheels of machinery by day and to light 
soap and automobile signs on Broadway by night. 
We should split atoms apart and release the mighty 
forces that had held them together since the be- 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ginning, for the production of commodities in 
greater and greater quantities at less and less cost. 

"We should, " I say, but I do our inmost thought 
a vast injustice. Rather, Progress would, scientists 
and inventors being only the instruments of a 
Fate which went steadily forward to the accom- 
plishment of its beneficent purposes. At the right 
moment, at the appointed hour, the man would 
appear. Progress kept the prompter's book and 
gave him the cue. 

To a people with all these evidences of an irresist- 
ible forward movement in Nature before its eyes, 
came a prophet who gave it its law, the law of 
evolution, the law by which once the monocellular 
organism had acquired the mysterious gift of life 
out of combination and recombination inevitably 
came man. It was all the unfolding of the inevit- 
able, the imrolling of time; the working out of a 
law. 

Now, law has a quite extraordinary effect upon 
men's minds. The more Law there is the less Man 
there is. The more man spells Law with a capital 
letter the more he spells himself with a small letter. 
Man was no longer the special creation of God. 
God, instead of making Adam and Eve his wife, 
fashioned a grain of star dust and gave it a grain of 
star dust to wife, leaving the rest to Progress. 
Man who had been a little lower than the angels 
became, by an immense act of faith, a little higher 
than the earthworm. The old doctrine of the Fall 

12 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

of Man took on a reverse twist. Man had not 
fallen but he had risen from such debased be- 
ginnings that he had not got far. He was in about 
the same place where he would have been if he had 
fallen. 

It was easy to turn upside down our belief in the 
Fall of Man. We always knew there was some- 
thing wrong with him, but we did not know what 
it was until evolution explained his unregenerate 
character so satisfactorily. Still the thought that 
Man did not move forward as fast as things, was 
less the special ward of Progress than automobiles, 
elevators and bathtubs, was vaguely disturbing. 

The Greeks had left us records which showed that 
the human mind was as good three thousand years 
ago as it is today, or better. We shut our eyes to 
this bit of evidence by abandoning the study of the 
classics and excluding all allusion to them in the 
oratory of our Congress. And Mr. Wells in his 
History has since justified us by proving that the 
Greeks were after all only the common run of 
small-town folk — over-press-agented, perhaps, by 
some fellows in the Middle Ages who had got tired 
of the Church and who therefore pretended that 
there was something bigger and better in the world 
than it was. 

So we pinned our hopes on the Martians and 
spent our time frantically signalling to the near- 
by planet, asking whether, when the earth grew 
as cold as King David when his physicians "pre- 

13 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

scribed by way of poultice a young belle," and 
responded only weakly to the caress of the Sun, 
when its oceans dried up and only a trickle of water 
came down through its valleys from the melting 
ice at its poles, we should not, like the fancied in- 
habitants of the nearest celestial body, have 
evolved at last into super-beings. We wanted some 
evidence from our neighbors that, in spite of the 
Greeks, by merely watching the clock we should 
arrive at a higher estate. 

The point I am trying to make is that we have 
been conducting the most interesting of Time's 
experiments in the government of men at a period 
when Man has been at a greater discount than 
usual in his own mind, when self-government faced 
too much competition from government by the 
clock. 

When I speak of government by the clock, I 
should, perhaps, use capital letters to indicate that 
I have in mind that timepiece on which is recorded 
God's Time; whose ticking is the forward march 
of progress. Clocks as they touch our lives require 
human intervention. The winders of these clocks 
perform something that may be described as an 
office. 

You recall the place the clock filled in our house- 
holds a generation ago. Father wound it once a 
week, at a stated time, as regularly as he went to 
church. The winding of it was a function. No 
other hand but father's touched the key; if one 

14 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

had, the whole institution of family life would have 
been imperiled. Father is a symbol for the govern- 
ment of the clock-winders, those sacred persons 
who translated Progress into terms of common 
utility. 

When we descended from the regions of theocra- 
tic power to those of human institutions, we found 
ourselves in America to be workers in one vast 
countrywide workshop. The workshop touches us 
more directly and more importantly than does the 
nation. Out of the workshop comes our bread and 
butter. When the workshop closes down we suffer 
and form on line at the soup kitchens. 

Three meals a day concern us more than do post- 
offices and federal buildings, of however white 
marble or however noble fagades. What we have 
to eat and to wear, what we may put in the bank, 
what real freedom we enjoy, our position in the 
eyes of men, our happiness and unhappiness, de- 
pend on our relations to the national workshop, 
not on our relations to -the national government. 

We conceived of it vaguely as a thing which 
produced prosperity, not prosperity in its larger 
and more permanent aspects — that was ours 
through the beneficence of Progress and the im- 
mortal luck of our country — but prosperity in its 
more immediate details. 

A lot of confused thinking in which survived 
political ideas as old as the race, converted into 
modern forms, entered into our conception of it. 

15 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

It was a thing of gods and demigods, with legends 
of golden fleeces and of Hercules holding up the 
skies. It was feudal in its privileges and immuni- 
ties. It enjoyed the divine right of kings. Yet it 
operated under laws not made by man. 

When it failed to effect prosperity, it was because 
of a certain law that at the end of ever so many 
years of fatness it must produce a famine. At such 
times men, demigods, stepped out of banks with 
sacks of gold on their shoulders and mitigated the 
rigors of its failure. 

And these splendid personages might set going 
again that which law stopped. We bowed patiently 
and unquestioningly to its periodic eccentricity as 
part of the Fate that fell upon the original sinner, 
and watched hopefully the powerful men who might 
in their pleasure or their wisdom end our sufferings. 

We were taught to regard it as a thing distinct 
from political authority, so that the less governors 
and lawmakers interfered with it the better for the 
general welfare. Back in our past is a thorough 
contempt for human intelligence which relates 
somehow to the religious precept against question- 
ing the wisdom of God. Whatever ordinary men 
did in the field of economics was sure to be wrong 
and to check the flow of goods upon which the well- 
being of society depended. We were all, except 
the familiars of the great forces, impotent pieces 
of the game economic law played upon this checker- 
board of nights and days. 

i6 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

I have said that this government of the national 
workshop in which we were all laborers or foremen 
or superintendents or masters sometimes seemed 
to our consciousness a government of laws and 
sometimes a government of men. In any primitive 
faith priests played a large part, and probably the 
primitive worshippers before them much of the 
time did not think beyond the priests, while some- 
times they did — ^when it was convenient for the 
priests that they should. 

When famines or plagues came it was because 
the gods were angry. When they are averted it is 
the priests who have averted them. When econo- 
mic panics came it was because we had sinned 
against economic law; when they were averted it 
was because men had averted them, men who lived 
on intimate terms with economic law and under- 
stood its mysterious ways, and enjoyed its favor, as 
their great possessions testified. 

Naturally, we are immensely more directly and 
more constantly concerned with this government 
than with the government at Washington. Be- 
sides, we were mostly business men, or hoped to 
be. It was our government more truly than was 
the government at Washington. 

Only a limited area in the political consciousness 
was left for self-government. You descended from 
the heights to the broad flat plain of man's con- 
tempt for man. It was there, rooted firmly in the 
constitution, that the government at Washington 

17 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

reared its head. Self-government is a new thing; 
no myth has gathered about it. It was estabHshed 
among men who beHeved in the doctrine of the 
original sin, and it had been carried by their 
successors, who had abandoned the sinner Adam 
as the progenitor of their kind for the sinless but 
inglorious earthworm. The inferiority complex 
which is the race's most persistent heritage from 
the past was written all over it. 

I suppose it was Adam Smith who made self- 
government possible by discovering that the things 
really essential to our welfare would take care of 
themselves if we only let them alone and that the 
more we let them alone the better they would take 
care of themselves, under eternal and immutable 
laws. Ah, the happy thought occurred, if the 
really essential things are thus beneficially regu- 
lated why shouldn't we have the fun of managing 
the non-essentials ourselves? 

Progress ruled the world kindly and well. It 
might be trusted to see that all went for the best. 
The government of business functioned effectively 
for the general weal. The future was in the hands 
of a force that made the world richer and better. 
The present, in all that concerned man most 
vitally with regards food and shelter, was directed 
by enlightened self-interest represented by men 
who personified success. 

It was impossible not to be optimistic when 
existence was so well ordered. There was no sorry 



PRESIDENT HARDING AND THE CLOCK 

scheme of things to be seized entire. Life was a 
sort of tropics without tropical discomforts. The 
tropics do not produce men. They produce 
things. 

The Mechanism worked, as it seemed to us, in 
those happy days. We were satisfied with the 
clock and the clock- winders. We were not divided 
in our minds as to whether we should turn back 
its hands. The less men meddled the better. 
There was little work for human government to do. 
There was no call for men. 

The picture in our heads, to use Mr. Graham 
Wallas 's phrase, was of a world well ruled by a will 
from the beginning, whose purpose was increase; 
of some superior men having semi-sacred relations 
with the will who acted as intermediaries between 
the will and the rest of us ; and of the rest of us as 
being rewarded by the will, through its inter- 
mediaries, according to our timidity and sub- 
missiveness. 

It was, the world, over the great age of the racial 
inferiority complex, for which Science had fur- 
nished a new and convincing basis. I might main- 
tain that the Great War was modern society's 
effort to compensate for the evolution complex; 
man wanted to show what he could do, in spite of 
his slimy origin. Anyway, it broke the picture in 
our heads. Being economical, like Mr. Harding, 
we are trying both to save the pieces of the picture 
and put them together again, and to form, out of 

19 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

them unfortunately, a new picture ; which accounts 
for our confusion. 

But the picture in our heads before the war, 
such as it was, is the reason for our present in- 
adequacy. You couJd not form much of a self- 
government or develop men for one, with that 
complex in your soul. 



20 



CHAPTER II 

god's time as it is; an ingersoll that requires 
much winding 

How many of us believe in Progress with the 
unquestioning faith we had before that day in 
July, 1 914, when Austria's declaration of war upon 
Serbia started the ruin of all that centuries had 
built up in Europe? Most of us have not stopped 
to analyze what has happened since to our belief 
that the world ever moved by an irresistible primal 
impulse forward to more and better things, that 
the song which the morning stars sang together 
was "It shall be multiplied unto you," that incre- 
ment is inevitable and blessed. But how many of 
us really believe that in the unqualified way we 
once did? 

The world had many pleasant illusions about 
Progress before the great catastrophe of 19 14 came 
to shatter them. And nowhere were these illusions 
more cheerfully accepted than in this country of 
ours, where a wilderness had become a great civil- 
ization in the space of a century and where the 

21 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

evidences of rapid, continuous advancement were 
nattirally strong. 

The first pleasant illusion was that modem 
progress had made war impossible, at least war 
between the great nations of the earth, which, 
profiting by the examples we had set them, en- 
joyed more or less free governments, where produc- 
tion mounted from year to year, where wealth was 
ever increasing. Destiny plainly meant more and 
more iron dug from the ground and turned into 
steel machinery, larger, more powerful automobiles, 
taller and taller buildings, swifter and swifter 
elevators, more and more capacious freight cars, 
and destiny would not tolerate stopping all this for 
the insanity of destruction. 

Moreover — how good were the ways of Progress 
— the ever increasing mastery over the forces of 
nature which had been fate's latest and best gift 
to humanity, approaching a sort of millennium of 
machinery, while creating vaster engines of indus- 
try had brought into being more and monstous 
weapons of warfare. 

Life with benignant irony was making man 
peaceful in spite of himself. His bigger and bigger 
cannon, his more and more lethal explosives were 
destroying his capacity for destruction. War was 
being hoist by its own petard. The bigger the 
armies, the more annihilating the shells piled up 
in the arsenals, the less the chance of their ever 
being used. 

22 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

Progress, infinitely good toward man, had found 
a way out of war, the plague that had blighted the 
earth since the beginning. What religion could 
not do, the steel foundries and the chemical labora- 
tories had done. They had made war too deadly 
to be endured. In effect they had abolished it. 
Peace was a by-product of the Bessemer oven 
and the dye vat. Man's conquest of himself 
was an unconsidered incident of his conquest of 
nature. 

Then there were the costs of war. Progress had 
done something more than make fighting intoler- 
ably destructive of men and cities ; it had made it 
intolerably destructive of money. Even if we 
would go to war, we could not since no nation 
could face the vast expenditures. 

Two little wars of brief duration, the Boer War 
and the Balkan War, had left great debts to be 
paid and had brought in their train financial dis- 
turbances affecting the entire world. A European 
war would destroy immensely more capital and 
involve vastly greater burdens. No nation with 
such a load on its shoulders could meet the com- 
petition of its peace keeping rivals for the world's 
trade. No government in its senses would provoke 
such consequences, and governments were, of 
course, always in their senses. 

You did not have to accept this as an act of 
faith; you could prove it. Shells, thanks to Pro- 
gress, cost so many hundreds of dollars each. 

23 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Cannon to fire them cost so many thousands of 
dollars each and could only be used a very few 
times. Armies such as the nations of Europe 
trained, cost so much a day to feed and to move. 
The demonstration was perfect. Progress had 
rendered war virtually impossible. 

If in spite of all a war between great modern 
nations did start, it could last only a few weeks. 
No people could stand the strain. Bankruptcy 
lay at the end of a short campaign. A month 
would disclose the folly of it, and bring the con- 
testants to their senses; if it did not, exhaustion 
would. Credit would quickly disappear. Nations 
could not borrow on the scale necessary to prolong 
the struggle. 

The wisest said all these things as governments 
began to issue orders of mobilization in 19 14. 
Emperors were merely shaking their shining armor 
at each other. There would be no war. It was 
impossible. The world had progressed too far. 
Anachronistic monarchies might not know it, but 
it had. Their armies belonged as much to the past 
as their little titles, as all the middle-age humbug 
of royalty, their high-wheeled coaches, their out- 
riders in their bright uniform, their debilitating 
habit of marrying cousins, their absurdities about 
their own divine rights. They had armies, as they 
wore upturned mustachios, to make themselves 
look imposing. They were as unreal as the pictured 
kings in children's story books or on a deck of 

24 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

cards. Forces mightier than they had settled 
forever the question of war. 

And when hostihties actually began an incredu- 
lous America knew they would be over in three 
months. Anybody with a piece of paper and a 
pencil could prove that they could not last. It 
took all of Kitchener's prestige to persuade society 
that the fighting would keep on through the winter, 
and his prediction that it would continue three 
years was received as the error of a reporter or the 
opinion of a professional soldier who overlooked the 
economic impossibility of a long war. 

It is worth while recalling these cheerful illusions 
to estimate what has happened to the idea of 
Progress in seven swiftly changing years. We did 
not give up readily the illusion that the world had 
been vastly and permanently changed for the 
better. As it was proved that there could be a 
war and a long one and as the evidence multiplied 
that this war was the most devastating in all his- 
tory, we merely changed our idea of Progress, 
which became in our minds a force that some- 
times produced evil in order that good might 
result. 

The Great War itself was assimilated to our idea 
of a beneficent fate. Whom Progress loveth it 
chasteneth. Instead of rendering war impossible 
by making it destructive and costly, it visited the 
earth with the greatest war of all time in order to 
make war impossible. This was the war to end all 

25 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

war. The ways of progress were past finding out 
but they were good. 

Paper demonstrations had gone wrong. Govern- 
ments did not go bankrupt after a few months but 
could still borrow at the end of five years. Human- 
ity did not sicken and turn away from the destruc- 
tion, but the greater the carnage the more eager 
were the nations still at peace to have a hand in it. 
Still it could never happen again. It was a lesson 
sent of fate. Men must co-operate with progress 
and not leave to that force the sole responsibility 
for a permanently peaceful futvire. They had 
sinned against the light in allowing such unpro- 
gressive things, as autocracies upon the earth. 
They must remove the abominations of the Haps- 
burgs and the Hohenzollerns. Once they had set 
up that brightest flower of Progress, modern 
democracy, in place of the ancient empires, there 
would be no more wars. Democracy had one great 
merit. It was rather stupid and lacking in fore- 
sight. It did not prepare for war and being forever 
unready would not fight. 

The war had been sent by Progress to call man's 
attention to their duties regarding certain an- 
achronisms with which Progress was otherwise 
vmable to deal. 

You will observe that the idea of Progress took 
three forms in as many years. First it was a pure 
force moving straight ahead toward a goal of un- 
imaginable splendor, even whose questionable 

26 




UNCLE SAM'S CONFERENCE 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

products like bigger cannon and higher explosives 
accomplished by one of its larger ironies benefits 
that were the opposite of their purposes. 

Then assuming the aspects of a more personal 
deity, it became capable of intentions and could 
choose courses utterly inconsistent with itself in 
order to achieve ends that would be splendidly 
consistent with itself. It made larger demands 
upon faith. 

Then it began to require a little aid from man 
himself, on the principle that God helps them that 
help themselves, the cleaning up by men of the 
human rubbish heap, the purging of autocracy 
by democracy. Human responsibility began to 
emerge. The picture in our heads was changing. 

Then, as the war came to a close it became 
apparent that President Wilson's happy idea that 
democracies, being stupid and unready to fight, 
would live together in eternal peace, was inade- 
quate. The treaty would leave the three great 
democracies armed as the autocracies never had 
been armed. They might elect to remain so and 
use their weapons as provocatively as any Haps- 
burg or Hohenzollern ever did. Men must organize, 
must league themselves together, must govern 
themselves internationally in order to have peace, 
which was no longer an accidental by-product of 
the modern factory, but must be created by men 
themselves, deliberately acting to that end. Men 
must work out their own salvation, aided and ad- 

27 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

monished of course by such perfect works of prog- 
ress as a war to end war. 

Men make the attempt. The peoples of the 
earth assemble and write a treaty which keeps the 
chief democratic nations on the continent of Europe 
armed against each other, which provides endless 
subjects of dispute among the smaller countries; 
and they sign a covenant which the unanimous 
opinion of mankind rejects as an effective safe- 
guard against future wars and which many regard 
as dividing the earth into two hostile camps. "It 
was humanity's failure, " declares General Smuts. 
"There will always be war," asserts President 
Harding, calling a conference not to end war but 
to lessen the cost of preparing for war. 

Not only has material progress failed to pro- 
duce peace as its by-product, but moral progress 
has failed to produce peace as its deliberate 
product. 

And Progress is in reality moving forward to 
wars more deadly and more ruinous than the last. 
Weapons were developed toward the end of the 
Great War capable of vastly worse havoc than any 
used during its course. And only a beginning has 
been made. If we may come to use the power that 
holds atoms together in the driving of engines, we 
may also use it in war to blast whole cities from the 
face of the earth. Conquest of the air means larger 
bombs from the air. Greater knowledge of chemis- 
try means industrial advancement and also deadlier 

28 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

poison gases. Material gains bring compensating 
material ills or the possibility of them. 

Even the material gains, great as they have been, 
seem somewhat smaller today than they once were 
thought to be. In our most optimistic moments 
before the war we had the pleasant illusion of 
steadily decreasing hours of labor and steadily 
lowering costs. Men had worked twelve, ten, and 
finally eight hours a day, and it was predicted that 
this process would go on imtil six, perhaps four 
hours a day would be sufficient to supply the needs 
of the race. 

We paid five cent fares on the street cars and 
were hopeful that they would become three cent 
fares; three cents was established by law in many 
cities as the maximum charge. The railroads 
collected a little over two cents a mile for carrying 
passengers and in many states statutes were en- 
acted establishing two cents a mile as the legal rate. 
We were impressed by striking examples of lower- 
ing prices, in the automobile industry for example, 
and were confident that this was the rule of modem 
life. 

Prices, except of food products, were steadily 
decreasing; there might be an end to this move- 
ment but we were nowhere near the end. The 
wonders of modem inventions, and if not these, 
the economics of concentrated organization, and if 
not these, the use of by-products, were steadily 
lowering costs. The standard of living was rising. 

29 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

What was the rich man's luxury in one generation 
was the poor man's necessity in the next. It would 
always be so. That was Progress. 

We now pay seven or eight cents to ride on street 
cars and more than three cents a mile to travel on 
trains. All prices have advanced. The standard 
of living has declined and we ask ourselves if it will 
not have to decline still further. No one now talks 
of a six-hour day. We recognize a check in the 
process toward increasing well-being at less effort. 
Life has become more difficult. Progress is no 
longer a simple and steady movement onward in 
a single direction. Like evolution sometimes it 
seems to stand still or perhaps go back. Like 
evolution it requires a vital elan; it is a thing of 
leaps and rests. We are less enthusiastic about 
it when it rests. 

We blame our discomfiture, the higher prices 
and the lower standard of living on the war, but 
much of it was inevitable, war or no war. The idea 
that the struggle for existence would grow steadily 
easier was largely a conclusion from appearances. 
We were raising oiu* standard of living by skimming 
the cream of otir natural resources. When our 
original forests were cut, when the most easily 
mined veins of iron and coal were exhausted, when 
oil wells ceased to gush and had to be pumped, 
unless substitutes were found, all the basic costs of 
production would advance . Ultimately they woul d 
advance to the point where economies of organi- 

30 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

zation, of quantity production, of by-product 
development, so far as they have been reaUzed, 
would no longer serve to keep down final prices. 
We were rapidly reaching that point when the war 
came. 

We lived under an illusion. What we called the 
results of progress was the rapid exhaustion of 
easily available resources. We used our capital 
and thought ourselves rich. And we lie under a 
burden of debt made much heavier by the weapons 
which progress put into our hands. Progress had 
not made war too expensive to fight but it had 
made peace too expensive to be borne. We forgot 
the law of diminishing ret tuns. We ignored the 
lessons of history that all ages come to an end, 
when the struggle for existence once more grows 
severe until new instruments are found equal to 
the further conquest over nature. Useful inven- 
tions have not kept pace with increasing consump- 
tion and rapidly disappearing virgin resources. 
The process of steadily lowering costs of produc- 
tion has stopped and reverse process has set in. 
Spectacular inventions like the airplane have de- 
luded us into the belief that Progress, always bless- 
ing us, we had the world by the tail. But coal and 
iron became harder and costlier to mine. Oil 
neared exhaustion. Timber grew scarcer. Agri- 
cultural lands smaller in proportion to population. 

Immense possibilities lie before us. So they did 
before the man with the stone hatchet in his hand, 

31 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

but he waited long for the steam, saw and drill and 
crusher. An invention which would mean as much 
in the conquest of nature as did the steam engine 
would make the war debt as easily borne as the 
week's account at the grocery store. But when will 
progress vouchsafe it? Converting coal into power 
we waste 85 per cent of its energy in coal and call 
that efficient. But does Progress always respond 
instantly to our needs with new methods and de- 
vices, like a nurse responding to a hungry child? 
A few years ago we were sure it did, but now we 
look anxiously at the skies for a sign. 

We had another characteristic pleasant illusion 
during the war. Progress, like the Lord, in all 
previous conflicts was on our side. Here was a 
great need of humanity. Surely, according to rule, 
it should be met by some great invention that 
would blast the Germans out of their places in the 
earth and give the sons of light an easy and certain 
victory. All the familiars of the deity sat about in 
boards watching for the indication that the engine 
to meet the needs of civilization had been granted. 
But it never was. 

I do not write this to suggest that men, especially 
American men, have ceased to believe in Progress. 
They would be fools if they had. I write to suggest 
that they have ceased to believe in Progress. They 
would be fools if they had not. A great illusion is 
gone, one of the chief dislocations wrought by the 
war. 

32 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

What the war has done to our way of thinking 
has been to lay a new stress upon man as a free 
and responsible agent. After all the battles were 
won not by guns, or tanks or gas or airplanes, but as 
always by the common man offering his breast to 
the shots of the enemy. The hope of the future is 
all in human organizations, in societies of nations, 
in councils and conferences. Men's minds turn 
once more to governments with renewed expecta- 
tion. Not only do we think for the first time 
seriously of a government of the world but we 
focus more attention on the government at Wash- 
ington. Groups with special interests to serve 
reach out openly to control it. 

The war laid a new emphasis on government. 
Not only did the government have our persons and 
our lives at its command but it assumed authority 
over our food, it directed our factories and our 
railroads, it told us what we could manufacture 
and ship, it decided who could borrow of the 
general credit and for what purposes, it fixed the 
prices at which we could buy and sell. It came to 
occupy a new place in the national consciousness 
and one which it will never wholly lose. One rival 
to it, — the belief, having its roots in early religious 
ideas, and strengthened by scientific theory and 
the outward results of the great inventions, that 
moved by some irresistible impulse, life went 
steadily forward to higher and higher planes, and 
that man had but little to do but pluck the 

3 33 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

fruits of progress — has been badly shattered by 
events. 

But men do not change behefs suddenly. Per- 
haps after all the war was only the way of progress 
— to usher in a new and brilliant day. Perhaps 
the unfolding future has something near in store 
far greater and better than went before. We shall 
not trust men too far, men with their obstinate 
blindness, men with their originally sinful habit of 
thinking they know better than the forces which 
rule the world. We want not leaders but weather 
cocks, who will veer to the kindlier wind that may 
blow when it is yet only a zephyr. 

We turn to men yet, we cling a little to the hope 
that fate will yet save us. This division in us 
accounts for Lloyd George and Harding, our own 
commonplace "best we have on hand" substitute 
for the infinitely variable Englishman, adjusted to 
every breath that blows, who having no set pur- 
pose of his own offers no serious obstacle to any 
generous design of fate. 

Senator Borah once said to me, "The Adminis- 
tration has no definite policies. " And it is not Mr. 
Harding's fault. If he wanted to form any the 
people wouldn't let him. They elected him not to 
have an}^ They desired in the White House some 
one who would not look further ahead than the 
next day until the future became clearer. If he 
had pm'poses events might prove them to be 
wrong. 

34 



GOD'S TIME AS IT IS 

The same fundamental idea underlay the remark 
of a member of the Cabinet, at the outset of the 
recent disarmament and Far Eastern Conference, 
that ' ' Lloyd George was the hope of the gathering 
because he had no principles." 

The war destroyed many men but it half restored 
Man. You see how inevitable optimism is. The 
ways of Progress are indeed past finding out. 
Governments during it performed the impossible. 
They even took in hand the vast industrial mech- 
anism which we ordinarily leave to the control of 
the "forces. " We half suspect they might do the 
impossible in peace but we half hope that some 
kindlier fate is in store for us than to trust ourselves 
to human intelligence. We don't knew whether 
to put our money on Man or on Progress; so we 
put it on Mr. Harding. 



35 



CHAPTER III 

GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

Unlike government by Progress, government by 
business, by the semi-sacred intermediaries between 
the will to increase and the rest of us, began to 
disintegrate before the war; which merely com- 
pleted the process. 

Let us consider what has happened in the last 
few years to government by business, that govern- 
ment which the smoking compartment philosopher 
has in mind when he says so hopefully of Mr. 
Harding: " They will see to it that he gets along 
all right." 

The first manifestation of nationality in this 
country was the nationality of business. Before 
industry became national nothing was national. 
The United States was a pleasant congeries of 
localities. It was held together by reading every- 
where the story of the Battle of Bunker Hill in the 
same school history, which sometimes bore a differ- 
ent author's name but which was always the same 
history. "Don't fire till you can see the whites of 
their eyes" and "If we don't hang together we 

36 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

shall all hang separately" were the unifying bond, 
and they were enough. We had the same sense of 
identity as an infant has when it becomes aware 
that the delightful toe and the delightful mouth 
where it is inserted appertain vaguely to the one 
ego. The local factory and the local bank sub- 
tended the entire arc of economic consciousness. 
There was one single-track railroad which ran from 
Podunk to Peopack and another from Peopack to 
Peoria, unrelated, discontinuous. 

In those simple times when business was local 
the local factory owner, banker, or railroad builder 
was the hero of his neighborhood. It was he who 
"put the town on the map." He gave it pros- 
perity. He built it by attracting labor into his em- 
ployment. He gave it contact with the outside 
world. If you owned town lots it was he who gave 
them value and it was he who might take away 
their value if he was offended. If you had a general 
store it was he who added to its patronage by add- 
ing to the population. If you raised farm products 
nearby it was he who improved your market. He 
built the fine house which it was your pride to show 
visitors. Your success and happiness was boimd up 
in his. He conferred his blessings for a considera- 
tion, for you were careful to make no laws which 
restricted the freedom of his operations. You 
permitted him a vast unofficial "say" in your local 
government ; you gave him a little the best of it in 
the assessment for taxes. You felt a little lifted up 

37 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

by his condescension in calling you by your first 
name and stopping to ask about your family on 
the street comer. You were jealous of his rights 
because after all the value of your own depended 
upon his use of his. 

When business figures arose upon the national 
horizon they were merely these local figures vastly 
multipHed. As a people we called them ' ' Jim' ' and 
* ' Jay, ' ' and * ' Dan'l, ' ' just as we had called the local 
manufacturer and banker by their first names. All 
the good will that went to the local business leaders 
went to them. They put money into our pockets, 
when they didn't happen to take it out of our pock- 
ets ; on the whole they were doing the great work of 
making this country a richer and better land. 
Some who did not conceive the resotuces of the 
printing press in the issuance of new securities had 
to suffer, but that was their lookout ; suffering for 
some was the way of the world. 

Business began to be national in the tying to- 
gether into systems the little dislocated railroads 
that local enterprise had laid down and in the crea- 
tion of a national securities market for the distribu- 
tion of ownership in the new combinations. 

A new era opened when Gould and Fisk and 
Drew started at full speed their rival printing 
presses in Wall Street. Look over otir whole drab 
political story from the death of Lincoln to the 
arrival of Roosevelt, more than a generation, and, 
if we did not preserve the names of our Presidents 

38 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

in our histories, how many names are there worth 
remembering? Garfield was shot, which was 
dramatic. Cleveland was a fat man who used long 
Latin words. He was also the first Democratic 
chief executive in more than thirty years. What 
else? Who else? 

Meanwhile an amazing array of business person- 
ages diverted attention from the inconspicuous 
Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys, who w^ere the 
flower of our public life. Gould, Fisk, Drew, Hill, 
Carnegie, the Rockefellers, Harriman, Morgan, 
Ryan — business was fertile of men, politics sterile; 
you have to go back to the foundation of the 
government for a period so prolific in men, of the 
other sort, or to the age of Elizabeth or of Pericles 
for another as prolific in men, of still another kind. 
How could the dull sideshow in Washington com- 
pete with the big spectacle in New York? 

These demigods of business were not only 
shining personalities ; they were doing the work of 
making America great and rich ; we all shared in the 
prosperity they were creating. To go back to the 
small town again, who was it increased the oppor- 
tunities of the storekeeper, the neighboring farmer, 
or real estate holder? Was it the mayor and the 
common council by passing ordinances about street 
signs and sidewalk encumbrances? Or the manu- 
facturer or railroad builder who put the town on the 
map, giving employment to labor or an outlet for 
its products? 

39 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

The government at Washington occupied a place 
in our consciousness similar to that of the govern- 
ment of the small town. It was charged with our 
national defense, a fimction of such little import- 
ance that we had hardly an army or a navy. It 
conducted our economic defense, against the for- 
eigner, with laws written, however, by business 
itself, which naturally knew best how it wanted to 
be defended; you could not, in your proper senses, 
suppose that the Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys 
were wiser than the Camegies, Hills, Morgans, or 
Harrimans. For the rest it was told severely to let 
well enough alone. To make assurance doubly 
sure that it would do so it was rather openly given 
over to the great men who were creating the na- 
tional wealth. 

Starting with the combination of the little specu- 
latively built railroads into systems and the 
development of a security market to float the shares 
of stock in the new companies, business took on 
rapidly a more and more national character. Great 
bankers arose to finance the consolidations. An 
investing public with a wider horizon than that 
which used to put its money in local enterprises 
entrusted its funds in the hands of the great bankers 
or took its chances in the market for stocks. In- 
dustry went through a similar concentration. 
Stronger companies absorbed their weaker and 
less successful rivals. The same bankers who sat 
in the boards of directors of the railroads represent- 

40 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

ing their investing public took their places in the 
directorate of manufacturing combinations. 

The railroads seeking the business of the big 
industrial companies and the big industrial com- 
panies desiring favors from the railroads placed 
representatives in each others' boards. This inter- 
locking created a national organization of business 
dominated by a few striking and spectacular 
figures. 

The popular imagination was as much heated 
over the discovery of the United States as a single 
field of enterprise as the imagination of Europe 
had been centuries earlier over the discovery of the 
new world. 

The psychology of the local industry period car- 
ried over into this new period of national industry. 
The whole country became one vast small town. 
The masters of industry, banking, and the railroads 
were the leading citizens. They were "putting the 
United States on the map," as the local creator of 
wealth had put the small town on the map. They 
were doing something vast, from which we all 
undoubtedly benefited. Perhaps we could not 
trace our advantage so immediately as we could to 
the enterprise of the man who brought population 
to our town, swelling the price of our real estate 
or increasing the sales at our stores. But what had 
been a matter of experience on a small scale was 
a matter of belief on a large scale. The same con- 
sequences must follow, v/ith manifold abundance. 

41 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

And the nation was demonstrably growing rapidly, 
immensely richer; surely cause and effect. 

Business had from the first taken on among us, as 
Mr. Lowes Dickinson remarks, a religious char- 
acter; and when by a great thrust it overreached 
the boimds of locality and became national, its 
major prophets emerged. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks 
quotes Mark Twain as writing: "The words of a 
proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound, 
and his common sayings are as if they were solid 
wisdom . ' ' How much more of this sacred character 
inhered in the heroes who created nationwide 
railroad systems, vast steelmaking consolidations, 
monopolies of oil and coal ! 

When a New York lawyer said of E. H. Harriman 
that he moved in spheres which no one else dare 
tread, he was putting, a little late, into words the 
national awe of the men who had overleapt the 
bounds of locality and bestrode the continent in- 
dustrially, the heads of the vast business hierarchy. 
When Mr. Baer said that he operated the Reading 
Railroad by divine right he said only what a wor- 
shipping people had taught him to think. Those 
men did not use this half-religious language by 
accident ; they crystallized into phrases the feeling 
of the country toward those who had done God's 
work of making it rich, making it successful. 

Each like an unconscious Cervantes helped to 
laugh our industrial chivalry away. 

How easy it is to believe about yourself what 

42 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

everyone believes about you! How hard not to! 
How easy to believe that you rule railroads by 
"divine right," or walk in "higher spheres," when 
the whole unexpressed consciousness of a hundred 
million people assigns you just such hieratic appur- 
tenances and privileges. How doubt in the face of 
all this evidence? They identified themselves with 
Progress, and Progress was what ruled the world. 
If you have faith and if you are fortified with the 
faith of others, self -identification with one of the 
larger forces is not difficult. Was not what they 
were doing Progress, was it not the realization of 
that benignant will to the utter blossoming of chaos 
into utility which was planned in the beginning? 
Were they not instruments rather than mere men, 
instrtmients of the greater purpose of which Amer- 
ica was the perfect work? If you believe in theo- 
cratic forces you believe also in chosen human 
agencies for carrying them out. 

They were more than instruments of Progress. 
I have spoken of government by economic law as 
having challenged political government in the 
consciousness of the people. As a country we 
perhaps believe in economic law more firmly than 
any nation in the world. Wasn't America being 
produced in accordance with economic law and 
wasn't America one of the marvels of the earth? 
I asked a salesman recently, a man with no per- 
sonal interests which would give him the prejudices 
of the business world, why he hated Henry Ford. 

43 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

"Because," he replied instantly and without hesita- 
tion, "he defies economic law." He spoke like a 
true American. To defy economic law and make 
money at it is like selling the Savior for twenty 
pieces of silver. 

"The physical laws," says De Gourmont, "pro- 
mulgated or established by the scientists, are con- 
fessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain 
a mechanism they declare its movements are due to 
a law. Bodies fall by virtue of the law of gravita- 
tion. This has precisely the same value in the seri- 
ous order as the comic virtus dormitivay In the 
promulgation of economic law our interest per- 
verts the simple and just operation of our ignorance. 
In the field of physical phenomena we perceive a 
series of uniform events and call that uniformity a 
law. In the field of economic phenomena w^e per- 
ceive a series of events uniformly serving our 
interests and call that uniformity a law. 

These greater business men of the past fruitful 
generation operated on the whole over a long period 
of falling prices. Wealth accumulated. You read 
about it in the government reports, dividing the 
total by the total population. The division thus 
effected was mighty assuring. Labor was better 
paid. Higher institutions of learning multiplied. 
Libraries housed in marble grew upon every cross- 
roads. Intellectual as well as material needs were 
in process of being better satisfied. We were ap- 
proaching an age when ink upon white paper, now 

44 




REPRESENTATIVE FRANK W. MONDELL OF WYOMING 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

so cheap, cheaper than ever in the pitiful past, 
should lift hiimanity to a new and higher level. 

The evidence was conclusive. These greater 
business men were in supreme, in conspicuous direc- 
tion of the country's development. The happiest 
results followed. They worked in harmony with 
economic law, for they prospered gloriously and 
one could no more break economic law and prosper 
than one could break criminal law and keep out of 
jail. Until Ford came no one could defy economic 
law with impunity. 

And law and justice being two ideas that associ- 
ate themselves together in the human mind, in a 
binder of optimism perhaps, like the disparate 
elements that form clinkers in a furnace, they were 
accomplishing that perfect work of the justice 
which inhered in things at the beginning, when tiny 
atoms with the urge to produce an earth fit for man 
to live on, to produce America in short, began to 
discover affinities for each other. No wonder they 
penetrated "higher spheres" ruled by "divine 
right," and that "golden words" dropped from 
their mouths. Progress, destiny, an instinct for 
economic law, it was much to imite one man. 

Again, they were more than this. Men cannot 
be so universally looked to for the welfare of the 
nation as they were, without becoming in effect the 
government of that nation. Business and the 
government were one. Public opinion at that time 
would have regarded an administration which de- 

45 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

fied the great commercial interests as dangerous to 
the country's advancement. Lawyers hke Mr. 
Knox or Mr. Root, who had proved their value to 
them, went to the Senate as their spokesmen. Able 
and ambitious men in both Houses of Congress, 
wishing power and influence, became their agents. 
The chairmen of the important committees of both 
houses were in their confidence and spoke with 
authority because of what they represented. Some 
of the virtue of the great, some shadow of divine 
right, descended upon them. Among valets the 
valet of the king is king. 

We forget, in the great outcry that was raised a 
few years ago over the "invisible government," 
that the invisible government was once sufficiently 
visible, almost consciously recognized, and fully 
accepted. It seemed the most natural thing in the 
world that the men who were making the country 
rich, making it a nation economically, should work 
their will freely at Washington. We jealously 
guarded their liberties. Woe unto the legislator 
who would interfere with their freedom to contract, 
for example, for the labor of children, which we 
described as the freedom of children to sell their 
labor advantageously. Adult labor banding to- 
gether to arrange terms of its own sale was felt to 
be a public enemy. Every age has its fetish; the 
medicine man who cotild exorcise the evil spirit in 
stone and bush was not a more privileged character 
than his successor at whose touch prosperity sprang 

46 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

out of the earth, at whose word the mysterious 
economic forces which might in their wrath prove 
so destructive, bowed and became kind. 

Make a few individuals the embodiment of a 
national purpose that has long existed, unconscious 
and unquestioned, give them as you inevitably do 
in such a case the utmost freedom that is possible 
on this earth, let them be limited enough mentally 
so that they are blind to any other possible purpose ; 
do all these things and you produce great men. It 
was an age of great men, Rockefellers, Carnegies, 
Morgans, Hills, Ryans, Harrimans, and a host of 
others, richer in personalities than any other period 
of American life except that which produced Wash- 
ington, Hamilton, Franklin, Jefferson, and Mar- 
shall. They were the flowering of the whole pioneer 
civilization. 

One hundred and fifty years of freedom has pro- 
duced few free men. Perhaps these were all. They 
may not have been free intellectually. Charles 
Francis Adams writes of their kind: "I have 
known, and known tolerably well, a good many 
successful men, — 'big' financially, men famous 
during the last half century ; and a less interesting 
crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that 
I have ever known would I care to meet again, nor 
is one of them associated in my mind with the idea 
of humor, thought, or refinement." 

Nevermind. They were free in all the essential 
ways. The men of whom Adams wrote had no 

47 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

such sense of their Hmi tat ions as he expressed. 
Only an Adams would then have had it, and the 
Adamses were not what M. Galtier of Le Temps 
suggested when, hastily absorbing the American 
spirit at Washington , he said to me : "I am reading 
The Education of Henry A dams: He was what you 
would call a typical American, was he not? " 

An Adams, even Charles Francis Adams, writing 
of that time, was untypical enough, to have missed 
the point, which was not whether these men "'big' 
financially" were interesting, witty, thoughtful, or 
refined, but whether they were free. And they 
were ; they were so sure of themselves, and public 
opinion was so sure of them, that they concentrated 
on the one great aim of that simple day, and did 
not waste themselves upon non-essentials like 
"humor, thought, or refinement." 

I have a theory that we are wrong in ascribing 
the poverty of American literature and states- 
manship to the richness of our business life. "All 
our best and ablest minds went into commerce," 
we say. We flatter oiurselves. Mr. Carnegie, bom 
in the days of Elizabeth, might not have been 
Shakespeare. Mr. Harriman was perhaps, after all, 
no mute Milton, Mr. Morgan no Michaelangelo. 

These brave spirits developed in business not so 
much perhaps because of the national lu-ge to 
"conquer a continent" as because in business, 
enjoying the immunity it then did, they found the 
utmost opportunity for self-expression, the one 

48 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

great measure of freedom which this free coimtry 
afforded. A jealous pubHc guarded their divine 
right from impious hands. They beHeved in them- 
selves. The people believed in them. So the 
flowering of the pioneer age came, in such a race of 
men as are not on the earth today, and the rule of 
business reached its climax. 

It was an autimm flowering, rich and golden like 
the Indian summer of New England culture, a sign 
that a cycle was run. Adams sniffing from the 
transcendental heights of Boston wrote: "a race 
of mere money-getters and traders." Remember 
the sneers in our cocksure press of those days at the 
"culture" of Boston? Boston has had its revenge. 
The words "mere money-getters" bit in. There 
were other objects in life beside pioneering the 
industrial opportunities of a whole continent just 
brought together into commercial imity. Mr. 
Morgan began to buy art. Mr. Carnegie began to 
buy libraries and started authorship himself. The 
men "'big' financially" began to look over their 
shoulders and see the shadows — as we all do now — 
where they a little before kept their eyes straight 
forward and saw the one clear vision, the truth, 
such as it was, that made them free. 

I have traced that element in the American po- 
litical consciousness, government by business, to 
its highest moment. 

"Divine right" is only safe when it is implicit. 
When you begin to avow it, as Mr. Baer did, it is 
4 49 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

already in question. The national passion for 
equality began to work. Had not Mr. Carnegie 
confessed the weakness in his soul's fortress by 
writing a book? Had not Mr. Morgan by buying 
art suggested the one aim of pioneering on a grand 
scale might not be life's sole end? 

Mr. Baer with his avowal, Mr. Carnegie and Mr. 
Morgan with their seeking of the broader satisfac- 
tions, Mr. Schwab behaving like a king in exile at 
the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, may have 
invited what followed. But they were only express- 
ing in their own way the sense becoming general 
that pioneering was over and that its ideals were too 
narrow and too few — even if no clear sense was 
coming of what state and what ideals were to take 
their place. Men turn from leaders whose day of 
greatest usefulness is past and set up new leaders 
against them. Against the government by business 
the first great national unity that entered the 
American consciousness they began to erect the 
state, the national government at Washington. 

No one meant to end government by business 
and substitute for it government by the people. 
Not for a moment. We devised a new set of checks 
and balances, like that between the various 
branches provided for in our Constitution, a new 
political organism which should equal and coexist 
with the one we already had. The government 
personified by Mr. Roosevelt was the check and 
balance to the government personified by Mr. 

50 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

Harriman and Mr. Morgan. Governments never 
die but merely recede in the national consciousness, 
like the old clothes which we keep in the attic. 
Thus revolutions never effect a revolution ; democ- 
racy is only a Troy built upon nine other prehis- 
toric Troys: beneath, you find aristocracy, rule by 
divine right, despotism, theocracy, and every other 
governance on which men in their invincible optim- 
ism have pinned their faith. 

The revolution which Mr. Roosevelt brought 
about was the kind which exclaims loudly "male- 
factors of great wealth" while writing to Mr. 
Harriman "we are both practical men." It w^as 
the kind of revolution this country desired. The 
nation wished to eat its cake and have it, to retain 
government by business and have alongside it 
another government, as powerful, as interesting, 
as colorful, as rich in personalities, as the late 
autumn of pioneering had brought into gorgeous 
bloom. 

Mr. Roosevelt's method with the new govern- 
ment was this: Senator Aldrich and Speaker Can- 
non representing the still powerful coexistent 
government by business in Congress, would call at 
the White House and tell the President just how far 
he could go and no further. They would emerge. 
A moment later the press in response to a summons 
would arrive. Mr. Roosevelt would say : "I have 
just sent for Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Cannon and 
forced them to accept my policy, etc." Nobody 

51 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

was deceived. Unlike the philosopher who made 
all laiowledge his province, Mr. Roosevelt made all 
knowledge his playground, and not only all knowl- 
edge but all the arts, including the art of govern- 
ment. 

In Mr. Roosevelt's day the two governments, 
government by business and political government, 
existed side by side, of about equal proportions; 
and no one really wished either to overtop the 
other. We were indulging in revolution with our 
customary prudence. 

The human passion for equality which had risen 
against the last of those dominant figiu'es, the last 
and greatest of the pioneers, and started to set up 
representatives of the public as great as they were, 
was singularly fortunate in its first manifestations. 
It "found a man," in that most amazing jack-of- 
all-trades, Mr. Roosevelt. 

If business had its array of extraordinary person- 
alities, the rival establishment had its Roosevelt, 
who siuTOunded himself with a shining group of 
amateurs, Mr. Root, Mr. Knox, General Wood, 
James Garfield, Mr. Pinchot, Mr. Knox Smith, the 
"Tennis Cabinet," to all of whom he succeeded in 
imparting some vividness from his own abounding 
personality. If pioneers from the days of Daniel 
Boone on have been romantic, amateurs are equally 
romantic . It was romance against romance . 

The balance between the two governments did 
not last long. Government by business was de- 

52 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

dining. It was being extruded from the control of 
political affairs. Political government was rising. 
It was reaching out to control certain phases of 
business itself. The great pioneers of national 
industry were growing old. They were becoming 
self-conscious, vaguely aware of changing circum- 
stances, casting about for solider foundations than 
"mere money getting," buying art and writing 
books, establishing foundations, talking foolishly 
about their "divine right," about the crime of 
"dying rich." 

A race of gamblers came in their train who cari- 
catured their activities . The great figures who were 
passing took long chances magnificently, pioneer 
fashion, "to strike it rich," to found industries or 
magnify avenues of trade. Their imitators, the 

Gateses, Morses, Heinzes, and took long 

chances vulgarly for the excitement there was in 
them. 

Railroads had to be " rescued ' ' from them. Wall 
Street had to organize its Vigilantes against them. 

I went as a reporter to see once in New 

York and found him in his library drinking. He 
sent for his servant, ordered six bottles of cham- 
pagne at once, and after his man had gone opened 
the whole six, one after another, on his library 
rug. He had to exhibit in some way his large 
manner of doing things, and this was the best way 
he could think of at the moment. He belonged to 
a fevered race, intoxicated with the idea of bigness, 

53 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

juggling millions about to no more useful end than 
that of pouring champagne on a carpet. They 
were the reductio ad absurdum of the pioneer. 

The public no longer put its faith blindly as 
before in those romantic figures, the great industrial 
pioneers, those Mississippi River pilots who knew 
every rock and reef in the river. Stripped of much 
power and prestige, no longer looked to without 
question for the safety of the country, that magni- 
ficent species, the great pioneer, disappeared. It 
is as dead and gone as that equally magnificent 
species the Mississippi pilot of Mark Twain's day. 

The legitimate succession was the dynasty — it 
was the dynasty that destroyed belief in the divine 
right of kings — of the second generation, of the 
younger Stillman, of the younger Rockefeller, com- 
petent but unremarkable, of the younger Morgan, 
more capable than the rest, doubtless, but compare 
his countenance with the eagle mien of his prede- 
cessor. 

I used often to discuss with Mr. Roosevelt the 
members of the dynasty. He had no illusions. We 
both knew well a second-generation newspaper 
proprietor, a young man of excellent character, as 
prudent as the earlier generation had been daring, 
a petty King who always had an aspiring Mayor of 
the palace at his elbow, inclined to go to sleep 
at his post from excessive watching of his property. 
As we would go over the names in the dynasty, 
Mr. Roosevelt would say almost invariably: "I 

54 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

can't describe him better to you than to say he's 

another ," naming oiir mutual acquaintance, 

one of the many of his sort into whose hands by 
inheritance the control of business has descended. 

Whatever the reason is, whether the inertia of 
large organization and the weakening of competi- 
tion have favored the remaining in power of the 
second generation, whether we have evolved but 
one great type, the pioneer, whose day is past, and 
have not yet differentiated the true business man 
any more than we have differentiated the true 
statesman; whether that psychological change 
which I have sought to trace, that denial of free- 
dom which once was the pioneers' — the new laws, 
the hard restraints operating now upon business 
as upon everything else and enforcing conformity — 
there are today no Titans, no one stealing fire from 
the heaven of Progress for the benefit of the himian 
race — unless Henry Ford — no Carnegies, Mor- 
gans, Rockefellers, Harrimans, of the blessed 
nineties. 

The old sureness is gone. The great pioneers 
were never assailed by doubts : they went straight 
forward, wearing the blinkers of a single aim, which 
kept their eyes like those of harnessed horses in the 
narrow road; God was with them, Progress was 
with them. Public Opinion was with them, the 
government at Washington was with them. 

But their successors, like everyone else, look over 
their shoulders and see the shadows : see the govern- 

55 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ment at Washington and attach a comic importance 
to that bewildered figtire ; just as the government at 
Washington looks over its shoulder and sees at 
New York the government by business, its tradi- 
tional master, and wishing a master, is unaware 
that the twilight of the gods is come. And both 
see that greatest of all shadows. Public Opinion, 
the new monster of Frankenstein which everyone 
feeds with propaganda, and fears. These three 
things were all one in the bright days of the great 
pioneers, and in that perfect unity everyone was 
sure, so sure, and the few were free, so free! 

Business no longer imposes itself up on the imagi- 
nation through its extraordinary personalities. 
In vain do we seek to recover the past. In vain 
does the popular magazine fiction strive to furnish 
what life no longer does — the pioneer ideal, the 
hero who overcomes fire and flood and the machina- 
tion of enemies and moves irresistibly forward to 
success, who believes in himself, whose motto is 
that the will is not to be gainsaid, whose life is one 
long Smile Week. 

Vast propaganda exists to hold us true to the old 
faith ; we read it as we used to read Sunday School 
fiction ; but religion only sought its way into hearts 
within the covers of E. P. Roe when other channels 
began to close. We beat the bushes for the great, 
the kings that should come after Agamemnon. 
Monthlies of vast circulation tell us of every jack- 
of -all-trades who hits upon a million dollars. This 

56 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

one found out how to sell patches for automobile 
tires. That one was an office boy who never knew 
when it became five o'clock in the afternoon. Our 
faith requires vast stirring. 

To the gradual weakening of the idea that busi- 
ness was all-wise and all-powerful, the war greatly 
contributed. Before 19 14 men would say con- 
fidently, "Ah, but business, the bankers, will not 
let the nations fight. They have only to pull the 
strings of the purse and there will be no money for 
the fighters." After hostilities began they would 
say with equal confidence: "It will be all over in 
six weeks. The bankers will not let it go on." 

Business was, however, not only powerless to 
prevent war but it stood by impotent while the 
very foundations on which it itself rested were 
destroyed. One illusion went. 

Then again, during the war unorganized private 
production failed. Publicly organized production 
was immensely successful. Governments the world 
over showed that the industrial mechanism could 
be made to run faster and turn out more than ever 
before. The illusion that business was a mystery 
understood only by initiates, the men "'big' 
financially," was shaken. 

After the war was over the government organiza- 
tion for regulating production was abandoned. A 
period of chaos, rising prices, speculation, wasteful 
production, of luxuries, ensued and then a crash. 
One may explain all that happened in both cases 

57 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

on the basis of the war. But business needed 
triumphs to restore its old place in the public 
consciousness, and it has had instead a catastrophe. 

The weakness of business today is its division. 
Many financial leaders saw the depression that 
would follow peace. Frank A. Vanderlip, for one, 
came back from Europe in 1919 full of warnings. 
He counselled moderation. He urged deflation 
instead of further inflation. His advice was un- 
popular w4th those who saw profits from a sudden 
withdrawal of wartime restraints. And the con- 
sequence of his prudence, according to what he has 
told his friends, was his being forced to retire from 
the Presidency of the great Wall Street bank of 
which he had been head. 

Henry Ford, moreover, is a destroyer of old 
illusions. He "defies economic laws." He does 
what business says is impossible. In a day of high 
prices he produces at an unprecedentedly low price. 
He does not cut wages. He finds a market where 
there is no market. To lower his costs he needs 
cheaper steel than he can buy, so he manufactures 
it himself cheaper than the great steelmakers can 
manufacture it. He operates independently of the 
"big business" group. Mr. Morgan sends for him 
and he declines to go. He grows vastly rich, prov- 
ing that all the knowledge the men "'big' finan- 
cially" have of the mystery of business is no 
knowledge at all, only rules made in their own 
interest. 

58 



GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS 

And business never twice answers the same 
question in the same way. One week Mr. Morgan 
and the international bankers come to Washington 
and tell Mr. Harding that American credit must 
go into loreign trade. The next week equally 
*'big" bankers from the interior visit the capital 
and tell the President that American credit must 
stay at home developing American industries. 
It is the same with the tariff. It is the same with 
the taxes. Business is not of one mind about 
anything. 

A politician recently described business on er- 
rands of advice to Washington. "One bunch of 
fat boys with high hats and morning coats comes to 
Washington. The Administration holds out its 
nose wishing to be led by it. The fat boys decline 
the nose. They are not leading anybody. In 
deprecatory manner they say : ' Please drive North. 
We think that is the way.' They go. The next 
day another bunch of fat boys in high hats and 
morning coats arrives. Again the offer of the 
nose. Again the declination. And this time: 
'Please drive South. We're sure that is the 
way. 

The government strains its ear to catch the word 
from Wall Street. But there never was a time 
when business had less influence at Washington 
than now. It is divided in its own mind, it is ruled 
by second-rate men. Of two governments that 
have occupied a place in the popular consciousness, 

59 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

government by business and government by parties, 
I do not know which is weaker. I do not know 
which has less unity and capacity to function, the 
Republican party or big business. 



60 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN IN THE GENERAL 

SMASH 

When we became doubtful, as pioneering drew 
to a close, that business served a social end; when, 
becoming jealous of its great and irresponsible 
power, we started to set up an equal or greater 
authority in Washington, we followed the line of 
least resistance ; we did the easy and obvious thing; 
we had recourse to a one man government. 

We magnified the office of President and satisfied 
that primitive instinct in us which must see the 
public welfare and the public safety personified 
in a single individual, something visible, tangible, 
palpable. The President speaks and you read 
about him in the daily press; the President poses 
and you see him in the movies and feel assured, as 
in smaller realms under simpler conditions people 
were able to see their monarch dressed and equi- 
paged in ways that connected him with all the 
permanence of the past, a symbol of stability, 
wisdom, and the divine favor. 

If the trappings are lacking, imagination and the 

6i 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

emotions supply their moral equivalent. Of our 
little temporary king no one must speak evil; no 
voice may be raised in criticism. 

His wife, up till some fourth of March an elderly 
country woman grown dull in the monotony of 
village life or worn with the task of pushing an 
unambitious husband forward to power, looking 
her most natural when in the frankness of early 
morning unpreparedness she ran in her apron across 
the street to gossip with the wife of a neighbor, 
becomes to the awed eyes of Washington women, 
quite "beautiful." You hear them say it of every 
— let us quote the illimiinating phrase — every 
"firstlady of theland." 

When Burke said that aristocracy was the most 
natural thing in the world he did not go half far 
enough. The most natural thing in the world, the 
thing which is always repeating itself under no 
matter whatever form of government exists, is an 
autocracy. In national emergencies, in times of 
peril, people put their fate in one man's hands; as 
in the late war when Mr. Wilson was made by 
common consent a greater autocrat than any Czar 
of all the Russias. 

The herd instinctively follows one authority. 
The mob is single-headed. All the traditions of the 
race lead back toward despotism and it is easier to 
revert toward something primitive than to go for- 
ward toward something higher in the scale of 
development. 

62 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

And, moreover, the vital contacts of our lives 
are with authority imposed from above. Our child- 
hood is controlled by the autocracy of the family. 
Education disposes of our hours, forces our inclina- 
tions, represses our individuality, and turns us out 
stamped with a imif orm mark, the finished product 
of its unvarying course. The single head of the 
classroom is the teacher. The single head of the 
school is the principal, of all the schools the Super- 
intendent. 

More important still, our economic lives are at 
the disposal of autocracy. We earn our livings 
under foremen and managers. Everywhere is the 
boss who says to us " Do this or starve. ' * He repre- 
sents to us not only authority but wisdom. The 
organization out of which proceeds to us the benefi- 
cent results of food and clothing operates because 
he is endowed with a knowledge which we have not. 
"He knows about it all, he knows, he knows." 

In all the essential everyday relations of life we 
have never been able to evolve any higher organiza- 
tion than that of the chieftain and his tribe. We 
read about democracy in the newspapers; once 
every two years or every four years we go through 
certain motions which vaguely relate to democracy, 
and which are not convincing motions. 

Democracy is an artificial edifice imposed upon a 
society which is in all other than its political as- 
pects entirely primitive. All our direct experiences 
are of one man power. It is the only organization 

63 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

we actually know at first hand. We trust to it for 
the means to live. We revert to it politically 
whenever it becomes an issue of life and death, and 
even in lesser emergencies. 

So it came about that when we determined to 
have a government at Washington independent of 
and better representing the social will, whatever 
that might come to be, than the government of 
business we had recourse to that one form of rule 
which is ever present in our consciousness, the only 
form imder which the race has lived long enough to 
have any real faith in it. 

The new social ideal had not sufficiently taken 
form to utilize all the complex institutions which 
existed in this cotmtry. Business was at that time 
intrenched in Congress. It would have been a 
huge, an impossible task, to re-make Congress, 
especially when no one knew definitely what pur- 
pose should animate the re-making. It was so 
much easier to find one man than to find many 
men. It is so much easier for a people which does 
not know where it is going but means to go there 
to choose one man, and by an act of faith endow him 
with the divination of leadership, than it is to have 
a national will and express it through numerous 
representatives. 

The amplified executive is a sort of blind pool of 
the national purposes. Creating an autocracy is an 
act of faith; democracy is work. And faith is so 
much easier than work. 

64 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

We did not think of it thus, as an exhibition of 
political inertia, as a reversion to an outworn type. 
On the contrary, we were immensely pleased with 
our innovation. As usual the United States had 
made an immense contribution to the art of govern- 
ment. We were repeating the race history of 
governments, as a child resumes in his life the race 
history of the human kind. We had got so far as 
to evolve that oldest of hviman institutions — 
autocracy, a mild, denatured autocracy. But we 
were as proud of it as a boy is when he put on paper 
with a pencil the very picture which his stone age 
ancestor cut laboriously into a walrus tooth. 

Our President had more power than the King of 
England, we boasted, more than the Emperor of 
Germany. The monarchies of Europe were obso- 
lete because they preserved autocracy out of the 
darkness of the Middle Ages. Our government was 
in the forefront of progress because it had created 
autocracy out of the suffrage of the people. 

And how clever we were with the restrictions of 
our written constitution with its exact balance of 
powers, executive, legislative, and judicial. The 
Fathers had builded wiser than they knew in writing 
an instrument by which the carefully distributed 
authority might be well reconcentrated ; as if they 
were the first to use words whose import depended 
on the point of view of those who interpreted 
them! 

Acres of space in the newspapers were covered 
s 65 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

with gratulatory articles proving that the dominat- 
ing executive was the inevitable unifying principle 
in our disjointed and not otherwise workable 
government. 

Ours was a government by parties, so the argu- 
ment ran, and the President was the head of his 
party. As a matter of fact the writers of the Con- 
stitution had not conceived of a government by 
parties. What they had in mind was what they 
had before them in the Constitutional Convention 
of which they were a part, a government by the 
best and ablest men of the community, who should 
meet together and select the executive ; who should 
equally through the state legislature choose the 
Senators . The r 61e of j ob brokers was the last thing 
they imagined themselves to be creating. Parties 
came later. Ours was not originally a government 
of parties. It is hardly a government by parties 
today. So there was nothing inevitable about this 
great reason why the Executive should be the ele- 
ment in our system which would hold it together 
and make it work. 

Nor until the beginning of this century did it 
ever occur to us that the President was the head of 
his party. The control of the organization had 
been in other hands, in Hanna's or Quay's or 
Cameron's, or divided among a group of men like 
these three, who represented the interests of busi- 
ness in the parties, and often also in the Senate. 

The idea that the executive was the party's head 

66 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

was merely a happy afterthought which was 
adopted to justify the resort to the Hne of least 
resistance in creating a stronger government at 
Washington, the concentration upon one man to 
represent the national will. We had simply done 
what other peoples had so often done in the history 
of mankind. When the English wished to weaken 
the rule of the great barons they magnified the office 
of the King. When we wished to get away from 
the rule of the barons of business we magnified the 
office of our elective King, the President. We 
invented new reasons for an old expedient. 

And by making the amplified executive the head 
of his party, which we did — for the Quays and 
Hannas speedily disappeared tinder the new order 
and left no successors — we set him to sawing off the 
limb on which he sat. If his authority rested on 
that of his party then to be fima the authority of 
the party must be firm. For parties to endure and 
be strong there must be a certain quality of perma- 
nence about them. They must not rest upon 
personalities but on principles and jobs, principles 
for the disinterested and for those whose interests 
are expressed in the principles, and jobs for those 
whose interests are less large and indirect. 

Of parties with the executive as their head noth- 
ing remained but their name. The only nexus 
there could be between the executive and the mass 
of voters was personal. One year a party was 
Roosevelt, the next year it was Taft and the dis- 

67 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

tance between Roosevelt and Taf t was the distance 
between East and West. A little later it even 
changed its name and voted in another coliimn be- 
cause Roosevelt had adopted a new party name and 
gone unto a new colimm. Four years later it split 
up and much of it went to Wilson, who temporarily 
rallied a personal following just as Roosevelt had 
done. 

And because the dispensing of jobs was an un- 
seemly occupation for the executive we reduced by 
law the patronage that was available for the susten- 
ance of parties. Thus we substituted personal 
caprice for the permanency of parties and at the 
same time cut down the practical means of holding 
organizations together. At the same time the 
decay of government by business left parties no 
longer an instrument of the economic will of the 
nation. 

Thus the executive headship was wholly incon- 
sistent with government by parties, upon which our 
magnified President was supposed to rest. A fur- 
ther inconsistency was that we adopted another 
theory for strengthening one man power. This 
was that the President was the leader of the people. 
Have we a government by parties there? Not at 
all ; the power of the executive rests upon something 
outside of and superior to parties. 

If the legislative did not respond to pressure he 
might "go to the people," as it was called, through 
the newspapers and upon the stump. He might 

68 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

discipline the recalcitrant by stirring up public 
sentiment against them. He might build up a 
personal following to such an extent that his party 
must have it in order to win. He might encourage 
the movement away from parties by attaching 
people to ideas and measures, policies that the 
party had declined to accept. In this theory of 
executive power it was conceded that parties were 
not to be trusted. In the other it was held that 
they were a necessary link between the dissociate 
branches of government. 

It is no exaggerated notion that executive con- 
trol of parties contributed to the disintegration of 
party government. It is nothing more than a state- 
ment of what actually happened. Roosevelt broke 
up the Republican party nationally. He left it 
with its name covering an agglomeration of groups 
and blocs and personal folio wings, i^upporters of 
various interests difficult to reconcile, whose votes 
fluctuate from year to year. 

Mr. Hughes, the same kind of executive and 
party leader as governor of New York, left the 
Republicans of that state in the hands of the little 
local banditti. Mr. La Follette, following the same 
methods as Governor of Wisconsin, left no one in 
that state definitely a Republican or a Democrat. 
Every voter there is the personal follower of some 
chief t am. 

And what virtue is there in the theory that the 
Executive alone represents the national point of 

69 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

view, that he alone speaks "for the country?" 
PoHtical inertia always finds good excuses. 

There are reasons why the President should try to 
represent the country as a whole, since he is elected 
in a nationwide balloting. But there is no reason 
why he should succeed in representing the country 
as a whole, why he should have a national point of 
view. 

Why should Mr. Harding have a vast under- 
standing of national problems and a clear sense of 
the country's will? A little while ago he was a 
Senator, and the supposition that the Executive 
alone has the national point of view implies that 
a Senator has not that point of view. Mr. Harding 
is chosen President and immediately upon his 
election by some magic virtue of his office he is 
endowed with insight and imagination which he did 
not possess as Senator. 

Mr. Harding is a good average President, a 
typical President, whether of the United States or 
of a business corporation, just the kind of man 
to put at the head of a going concern where a 
plodding kind of safeness is required of the execu- 
tive. We shall do well, should our standards of 
public life remain what they are, if we have three 
Presidents superior to Mr. Harding in energy or 
originality of mind, diuing the whole of the coming 
century. But why should Mr. Harding understand 
or represent the national point of view? 

Mr. Harding lived his life in the indolent com- 

70 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

fortable mental atmosphere of a small town. His 
horizon was narrow and there was no force in him 
which made him seek to widen it. His public ex- 
perience before coming to Washington consisted 
of brief service in the Ohio State legislature and a 
term as Lieutenant-Governor of Ohio. His service 
in the Senate at Washington was short and it was 
beginner's work, undertaken in the spirit of a man 
who finds the upper house a pleasant place in which 
to pass the latter years of a never strenuous life. 

His point of view on national problems was a 
second-hand point of view. He knew about them 
what his party had said about them, in its plat- 
forms, on the stimip, in the press. He accepted the 
accepted opinions. No magic wrought by election 
to the Presidency could make of him or of anyone 
else a great representative of the national purpose 
or endow him or anyone else with deep understand- 
ing of national problems. 

Of recent Presidents Mr. Taft failed so completely 
to understand his people and express its will that 
after four years in office he could command the 
support of only two states when seeking re-elec- 
tion. Mr. Wilson after foiu* years had so far failed 
that only the incredible stupidity of his opponents 
enabled him to succeed himself; and again so far, 
that his second term ended in a tragedy. The 
floundering of Mr. Harding is apparent to every 
eye. 

Only imder two Presidents has the theory of 

71 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

executive domination of the Government suc- 
ceeded, and not completely under them. Congress 
rose against Mr. Roosevelt in the last year or two 
of his administration. Congress was not of Mr. 
Wilson's party, and was thus out of his control in 
the last two years of his administration. Mr. Taft 
lacked the will to rule. Mr. Harding is feebler 
than Mr. Taft, and party authority, one of the 
pillars of executive power and responsibility, is now 
completely broken down. A system which is suc- 
cessfid only half the time cannot be called workable. 

Let us examine the circumstances imder which 
the Executive was able to prevail over Congress and 
effect a limited sort of one man government. They 
are not likely soon to repeat themselves. 

Mr. Roosevelt was an extraordinary personality. 
Only Andrew Jackson, among our Presidents, was 
as picturesque as he, only Andrew Jackson had a 
popular following comparable to his. 

Both of them represented strong democratic 
movements, — Jackson the extrusion of the landed 
aristocracy, in favor of the masses, from their 
preferred position in our political life ; Mr. Roose- 
velt, the similar extrusion of the business aristo- 
cracy, in favor of the masses from the preferred 
position they had gained in our political life. Like 
agitations of the political depths, finding expression 
in personalities as unusual as those of Jackson and 
Roosevelt, will give us from time to time executives 
who may carry everything before them ; but only 

72 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

emergencies like this and one other will make the 
President supreme. 

And even then it is easy to overstate the power 
of the Executive as it was exercised by Mr. Roose- 
velt. The Colonel lived by picttiresque exaggera- 
tion. If he went to South America it was to 
discover a river and find animals that the eye of man 
never rested on before or since. He read more 
books than it was humanly possible to read and not 
become a pallid bookworm. He pursued more 
interests than mere m.an can have. He exercised 
daily as only a pugilist exercises briefly when in 
training. 

He had the gusto of the greatest amateur of all 
time and enjoyed the immunity which is always 
granted to amateurs, that of never being measvired 
by professional standards. "V^ hen you might have 
been noting a weakness in one direction he was 
diverting you by an enormous exhibition of versa- 
tility in another. He had the capacity of seeming, 
and the semblance was never penetrated. He 
seemed to bestride Washington like a Colossus. 
Actually his rule was one long compromise with 
Aldrich and Cannon, the business leaders of Con- 
gress, which he represented as a glorious triumph 
over them. 

One man government was developed much 
further under Mr. Wilson than under Mr. Roose- 
velt. Mr. Harding's predecessor entered office as 
the expression of that movement toward a govern- 

73 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ment based on numbers rather than on wealth, 
which the Colonel had so imperfectly effected. 
There had been a reaction under Taft ; there was a 
new determination under Wilson, and a new con- 
centration on the executive. 

Poor, bookish, without the friendships in the 
business world which Mr. Roosevelt had had, 
having few contacts with life, Mr. Wilson embraced 
the idea of putting business in its place passion- 
ately, where Mr. Roosevelt played with it as he 
played with everything else. 

Mr. Wilson was by temperament an autocrat. 
An illustration of how personal was his government 
was his treatment of his enemies. His bitterness 
against Huntington Wilson, the Republican Am- 
bassador to IMexico, is well known. A year or two 
after the dispute was over, Huntington Wilson's 
son came up for examination to enter the Consular 
service . He passed at the top of the list . President 
Wilson heard of his success and directed that he 
should receive no appointment. He carried his 
enmity to the second generation. The law which 
would have given yoimg Mr. Wilson a place meant 
nothing under his personal government. 

As Anatole France says of Robespierre, he 
*'etatt optimiste qui croyait d la vertue.'' Those who 
are "optimists and believe in virtue," remarks the 
French author, end by killing men. Wilson in a 
revolution would have conducted a Terror, as 
indeed during the war he did conduct a sort of 

74 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

legal terror among pacifists and radicals. Roose- 
velt belonged to the other school in the conduct of 
affairs which Anatole France praises because it 
never forgets that men are '^des mauvais singes.'' 
In a revolution Roosevelt would have cut off no 
more heads than would be necessary to make a 
good show. 

Moreover, when Mr. Wilson entered office his 
party had been long out of power. Its leaders in 
the House and Senate w^ere not firmly established. 
Unlike Cannon and Aldrich, of the Roosevelt day, 
they did not represent business in the national legis- 
lature. They had no authority except the purely 
factitious authority created by the accident of 
seniority. They were easily dominated from the 
White House. 

Coming into power at such a moment, possessing 
such a temperament, representing such a popular 
movement, Mr. Wilson readily became the most 
perfect example of the concentrated executive that 
we have yet had. But even his one man govern- 
ment was attacked from the outset. His personality 
proved repellent. An intellectual is so unfamil- 
iar an object in America as to seem almost a mon- 
strosity, and his ascendancy would not have lasted 
beyond two years if the war had not come. 

War is the other great cause that leads to auto- 
cracy in popular governments. In times of common 
danger we revert to the herd with the single leader- 
ship. We resort to the only form of rule of which 

75 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

we have any experience in our daily lives, the only 
form in which the race has yet developed any last- 
ing faith. From the time when war threatened, 
with the invasion of Belgium, till the time when 
it ended with the armistice, Mr. Wilson became 
what any President may become imder like 
circumstances, what Mr. Wilson's temperament 
especially fitted him to become — an absolute 
dictator. 

When we think of the powerful executive as the 
natural development of the American system, im- 
parting that unity to our government which the 
makers of the Constitution in their zeal for checks 
and balances refused to give it, we are over- 
impressed by the phenomena of Roosevelt and Wil- 
son and do not make sufficient allowances for the 
conditions which made their power inevitable. So 
impossible is it for authority to remain permanently 
in the hands of the executive that we are now wit- 
nessing its spontaneous movement away from the 
White House — toward, well for the moment I should 
say, toward nowhere. 

A distinguished alienist tells me that the desire 
for power over your fellow man is an immistakable 
sign of paranoia, not necessarily paranoia amount- 
ing to insanity, but the same kind of paranoia 
which makes history amusing. If that is true, then 
we are in an era of perfect sanity at Washington. 
No one, no one, in the White House, in the Capitol, 
in Wall Street, the capitol of business, or back 

76 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

among the home folks, as far as I can learn, wants 
power — and responsibility. 

The picture I have drawn, quoting a bright 
young observer at the capital of what happens 
when Business arrives in Washington is the picture 
of our whole present national political organization. 
"A bunch of tall-hatted fat boys comes. The 
governmental nose is thrust out awaiting the guid- 
ing hand. The guiding hand is put unostenta- 
tiously behind the back." It is the same when the 
organ of leading is extended from the White House 
for the hand of leadership at the Capitol, or, as 
happens, as often the organ of leading at the Capi- 
tol awaits the hand of leadership at the White 
House. 

Power is in transition and we do much inconsis- 
tent thinking about where it is and where it should 
be. We deliberately elected a weak executive, to 
retrieve the blessed days of McKinley, the old 
equilibrium and co-ordination of the equal and co- 
ordinate branches of our government. Yet when 
things go badly in Congress, as they mostly do, the 
critics exclaim that the President should be firm 
and "assert his authority" on the hill. Mr. Hard- 
ing himself said, over and over again, "This is no 
one man job at Washington. ' ' Yet we read that his 
face assumes a "determined expression" — I have 
myself never seen it — and he sends for the leaders 
in Congress. 

We haven't executive domination and we haven't 

77 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

an>i;hing in its place. We voted to go back to the 
nineties, but we haven't got there. There is no 
JMark Hanna speaking for business and for part}'- 
to make the system work. We have the willessness 
of the blessed days in our National Heartbreak 
House, but we haven't the will somewhere else to 
act and direct. Not even seven million majority 
is enough to bring back the past. In spite of 
"landslides" the course is alwa3^s forward, and I 
use "forward" not in the necessarily optimistic 
sense of those who were once so sure of Progress. 

The initiative, so far as there is any, has passed 
to Congress. 

And so far as I can see, it is likely to remain with 
Congress, until some new turn of events brings us 
back the strong executive. For, after all, Congress 
chose IMr. Harding. The Senators picked him at 
Chicago. With party bosses gone, they are about 
all that remains of the part}^ and there is no reason 
why they should not go on naming Presidents. And 
the power of presidents will not rise much above its 
source. 

The autocratic President goes ine\'itably the way 
its prototype the autocrat went. The loins that 
produce them are sufficiently fertile. Primogenitiu'e 
brought forth feeble kings. The nominating system 
called on for a great man ever\^ four years jdelds 
many feeble ones. There will be many Hardings 
to one Roosevelt or Wilson. Party government 
which might reinforce a feeble president is weak. 

78 



THE SUPER-PRESIDENT GOES DOWN 

Government by business has lost its confidence and 
authority. The great discovery of the first decade 
of this century for making this government of ours 
work is already in the discard. 

So at a critical moment when government by 
Progress and government by business have broken 
down, government by one man at Washington has 
also gone. The war made the autocratic executive 
in the person of Mr. Wilson intolerable. It also 
destroyed the basis for national concentration upon 
the executive. 

We need a new picture in our heads of what 
government should be, what its limits should be 
when it faces such vital problems as interfering 
with God's time, and where its authority shotdd 
center. We have none. 



79 



CHAPTER V 

LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM — IN THE BOSOM 
OF TH^RESE 

We now pursue further the search for authority. 
We shall surely find "divine right" somewhere, 
now that business has lost it. Someone certainly 
has the final word about the pictures to put in our 
heads. Ah! there is the public, the imputation 
of a miraculous quality to whose opinion has a 
curious history. 

Everybody agrees that we owe most of the 
pleasant illusions upon which this democracy of ours 
is based to Rousseau. This Swiss sentimentalist 
about humanity, whose ideas have so profoundly 
affected the history of the last century and a half, 
was a convinced believer that perfect good sense 
resided in the bosom of the natural man, the man 
"bom free and equal" of oiir Declaration of 
Independence. 

Rousseau could find this simple wisdom which 
was his delight in the most imexpected places. 
He describes his mistress Th^rese with whom he 
lived many happy years: "Her mind is what 

80 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

nattire has made it; cultivation is without effect. 
I do not blush to avow that she has never known 
how to read, although she writes passably. When 
I went to live in the Rue Neuve des Petits Champs 
I had opposite my windows a clock face on which 
I tried during several months to teach her to tell 
time. She can scarcely do it even now. She has 
never known in their order the twelve months of 
the year, and she does not know a single figure in 
spite of all the pains I have taken to explain them 
to her. . . . But this person, so limited and, 
if you wish, so stupid, has excellent judgment on 
occasions of difficulty. Often in my troubles she 
has seen what I did not see myself; she has given 
me the best advice to follow. She has pulled me 
out of dangers into which I rushed blindly. . . . 
The heart of my Therese was the heart of an 
angel. {Le coeur de ma Therese etait celui d'un 
ange.)'' 

It would be amusing to trace our belief in the 
good sense of man, in the wisdom and justice of 
public opinion, back to a philosopher's delight in a 
female moron ; but that would be too great a para- 
dox for a serious discussion of today's crisis in 
popular government. The truth probably is that 
Rousseau reached a priori the conclusions about 
the sound sense of the simple and natural man that 
captivated a society so simple and natural as our 
own was in the eighteenth century, and then 
stumbled upon such convincing evidence in the per- 
6 8i 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

son of Therese that he had to keep it by him all the 
rest of his days. 

And where after all has there been found any 
better evidence for our belief in the soundness and 
justice of public opinion than was furnished by the 
unlettered and unteachable Therese, who had 
"le coeur d'un ange" and "devant les dames du 
plus haut rang, devant les grands et les princes, ses 
sentiments, son bon sens, ses reponses et sa con- 
duit e lui out tire I'estime universelle " ? 

To accept the doctrine of the rightness of public 
opinion you must believe that there resides in 
every man, even in the most unpromising man, of 
the mental level of Therese, *'si bomee et, si Ton 
veut, si stupide," the capacity to be, like her, 
"d'un conseil excellent dans les occasions difficiles." 

The doctrine of the rightness of public opinion, 
however, never required proof. It was a political 
necessity. The world at the tim.e when modern 
democracies had their birth accepted government 
only because it rested upon divine right. The 
government of men by mere men has always been 
intolerable. 

The new democracies which were to take the 
place of the old kingdoms had to have some 
sanction other than the suffrages of the people. 
Room had to be found in them somewhere for 
divine right. Those who established the modern 
system could never have sold self-government to 
the people as self government. There had to be 

82 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

some miracle about it, something supernatural, 
like that marvel which turned a mere man into a 
King and gave him that power of healing by touch 
which was exercised in Galilee, so that the laying 
on of his hands cured the king's evil. 

The miracle was accomplished somewhere in the 
process through which your opinion and my opin- 
ion and Therese's opinion became public opinion. 
Just as the anointment or the coronation turned 
a mere human being by a miracle into the chosen of 
God ruling by divine right, so by some transmuta- 
tion which does not take place before the eyes, 
mere hinnan opinion becomes itself the choice of 
God, ruling by divine right. 

If you doubt that the founders of modern de- 
mocracy had to carry over into their systems the 
old illusions about divine right, read what Thomas 
Jefferson, more or less a free thinker, quoted by 
Mr. Walter Lippmann in his Public Opi?iion, has 
to say about the divine basis for popular govern- 
ment: "Those who labor in the earth are the 
chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen 
people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar 
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is 
the focus in which He keeps . alive that sacred fire 
which might otherwise escape from the earth." 

That "deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue" was public opinion. Nothing was lost of 
the sanctions of monarchic government when we 
changed to popular government. 

83 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Since the days of Jefferson we have ceased to be 
an agricultural people and we can no longer de- 
rive the authority of our government from the 
Rousseauist notion that the farmer, being near to 
nature, thrusting his hands into the soil, was the 
choice of God and ruled by a kind of divine right. 
But "aucune religion n'est jamais morte, ni ne 
mourra jamais." 

Let us examine the doctrine of Jefferson. Public 
opinion ruled by divine right because, in this 
country and in his day, it was the opinion of 
farmers, who were "the chosen people of God 
whose breasts He has made the peculiar deposit 
for substantial and genuine virtue." 

When we ceased to be a nation of farmers did 
we abandon the basis of our government in divine 
right? Not in the least. We broadened our groimd 
to cover the added elements of the community and 
went along further with Rousseau than Jefferson 
had need to do ; we said that the breasts of all men 
"He has made the peculiar deposit for substantial 
and genuine virtue." The art of uncovering their 
substantial and genuine virtue, this quality in 
Therese which drew down upon her universal es- 
teem for her good sense and her sound sentiments, 
is the art of arriving at public opinion. 

The legend of public opinion is thus ac- 
counted for; first, you will observe, it was politi- 
cally necessary to assert the inspiration of public 
opinion, for divine right had to reside somewhere. 

84 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

Second, in a democracy the press and public men 
had to flatter the mass of voters and readers by 
declaring on every possible occasion that wisdom 
reposed in their breasts. And third, the public 
mind differed so from the ordinary thinking mind 
that, to put its conclusions in a favorable light, 
men had to assume some supernatural quality, 
some divine "deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue." 

The public did not think, in the ordinary sense, 
yet its decisions were more right than the care- 
fully elaborated decisions of those who did think; 
the wonder of Therese over again, who "si bomee et 
si stupide" gave such excellent advice on difficult 
occasions. No processes by which results were 
reached could be perceived by the trained mind. 
The mystery of the public mind was as great as the 
mystery of intuitions is to the logical or the mys- 
tery of poetry is to the prosaic. Clearly, a miracle; 
clearly, a deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue. 

When modem democracy got its start, kings by 
their folly had shaken faith in their divine right. 
In a similar way at this moment, public opinion 
by its excesses has made men question whether 
any "deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" 
has been placed in human breasts upon which 
states may rely for justice and wisdom. 

Walter Lippmann's book, Public Opinion, with 
its destructive analysis of the public mind, is a 

85 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

symptom of those doubts with which the war has 
left us. The years from 19 14 on furnished the 
most perfect exhibition of pubhc opinion and its 
workings that the world has ever seen. You saw 
on a grand scale its miraculous capacity for instant 
formation and, if you are sufhciently detached now, 
you look back and doubt whether what was re- 
vealed was a "deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue." 

Both sides to the conflict resembled nothing so 
much as prehistoric tribes meeting accidentally 
in the night and, precipitated into panic, fighting 
in the belief that each was being attacked by the 
other. 

Public opinion in France and England felt that 
the war was defensive. Public opinion in Germany 
was equally sure that Germany was only defending 
herself. Either the German Therese or the French 
Therese and the English Therese and the American 
Therese must have been wrong. The fight could 
not have been defensive on both sides. And if 
Therese is ever so wrong as this, the whole case 
of the divine right ness of public opinion falls. 

And not only do we know that some Therese, 
perhaps all the Thereses, made a mistake in this 
instance, but we have come to feel that whenever 
danger arises Therese is inevitably wrong ; her mind, 
such as it is, closes up and she fails to show those 
sentiments and that bon sens which drew down the 
applause of the princes and the persons du haut rang 

86 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

who have been praising the deposit of virtue that 
she carries in her breast. 

We have watched the course of Therese con- 
fronted by other and smaller fears since the close of 
the war, and we have reached the conclusion that 
Therese always reacts a certain way. In that large 
range of situations which may be artfully pre- 
sented to her simple mind as perils she is no longer 
d'un conseil excellent; her heart d'u7i ange hardens; 
she abandons her babies quite unfeelingly at the 
hospital of the Nouveaux Nes. 

Therefore you do not reach the "deposit for 
virtue" by simply employing an intelligence 
unencumbered by mental processes. You must at 
least assure that intelligence against fear, a serious 
limitation upon the doctrine of an infallible public 
opinion. 

Students of public opinion will for a long time go 
back to the period of the war for their materials. 
Opinion was then unmistakable. The methods 
by which it was formed were clear. In times of 
great peril men throw off their polite disguises and 
are frank; so too are institutions. 

The making of opinion became an official func- 
tion in which we all co-operated. We bound our- 
selves voluntarily not to publish and not to regard 
any information inconsistent with the state of 
mind which it was deemed expedient to create 
and maintain. We probably always in the form- 
ing of opinion tacitly impose voluntary censor- 

87 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ships, but they are so habitual, so unconscious, so 
covered with traditional hypocrisy, that it is 
difficult to bring them into the light. 

Conscious self-deception to the good end of 
keeping ourselves united and determined was dur- 
ing the war a great virtue. Playing upon prejudice, 
rousing the depths of the primitive mind in man, 
was a laudable act of patriotism. 

What happened then was only an exaggeration 
of what happens all the time, for war makes no 
new contributions to the art of self-government. 
In war we merely throw off the restraints of peace 
and impose others which operate in the reverse 
direction. In peace we are shamefaced about 
direct killing; in war we brag of it. In peace we 
are shamefaced about manufacturing public 
opinion ; in war it is our patriotic duty. 

No, war has made us rather doubtful about 
Therese. After all Rousseau was a prejudiced 
witness. When you take to your bosom a lady 
who cannot learn to tell time by the clock, you 
have to make out a case for her — or for yourself. 
When like Jefferson and his successors you take 
to your bosom the public, you have to make out 
a case for it, for the deposit for substantial and 
genuine virtue that you rely upon. 

The war revealed at once the immense power 
and the immense dangers of public opinion when 
its full force is aroused and one hundred million 
people come to think — thinking is not the word — 

88 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

to feel, as one man. Minorities, the great cor- 
rective in democracy, disappeared. They had 
their choice of going to jail or bowing to the general 
will. 

Few realized this alternative, so irresistible was 
the mob impulse, awakened by the sense of com- 
mon danger, even to individuals ordinarily capable 
of maintaining their detachment. The primitive 
instinct of self-preservation subdued all capacity 
for independent thinking, so that one who has 
ordinarily the habit of making up his own mind, a 
most difficult habit to maintain in modern society, 
can not look back on himself during the war with- 
out a sense of shame. Romain Rolland, in Cleram- 
beault, pictures the devastating effect of public 
opinion at its mightiest upon the individual 
conscience. 

The mechanism by which this state of mind was 
created was unconcealed. The government re- 
served to itself the right to suppress truth or to put 
out untruth for the common good. Private organ- 
izations of endless number co-operated to this 
laudable end. The press submitted itself to a 
voluntary censorship, passing the responsibility for 
what it printed over to society whose general end 
of maintaining unity for the real or imaginary 
necessities of self-defense it served. A lynch law 
of opinion was established by common consent. 

What went on during the war goes on, though 
less openly and less formidably, all of the time. 

89 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Everyone realizes the immense power of public 
opinion. Many seek to direct its formation. The 
government conducts all of the time a vast propa- 
ganda, always with a certain favor of the press. 

We submit always to a certain voluntary cen- 
sorship, not so conscious as that which existed 
during the war but none the less real. We receive 
upon the whole the information which is good for 
us to receive. We are all a little afraid of public 
opinion, its tyranny, its excesses, its blind tenden- 
cies. We do not find it, as Jefferson thought we 
should, a "deposit for substantial and genuine 
virtue," and we are all more or less consciously 
trying to make it one ; that is the process of render- 
ing modern democracy workable ; but we may not 
be all unprejudiced about what the deposit should 
be or scrupulous about the means of improving 
it. 

The part which the press plays in this process 
is peculiar. When editors or correspondents meet 
together the speaker addresses them invariably as, 
"You makers of public opinion," but the last re- 
sponsibility which jotirnalism cares to assume is 
the making of public opinion. 

This disinclination began with the exclusion of 
the editor's opinion from the news columns. 
Gradually, it extended to the exclusion of his opin- 
ion from the editorial pages and finally to its exclu- 
sion from his own mind. I am speaking only of 
tendencies, not of their complete realization, for 

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LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

there are notable exceptions among the greater 
daihes of this country. 

This movement is at its strongest in the na- 
tion's capital, for official Washington likes to live 
in an intellectual vacuum, and journalism strives 
successfully to please. With the world crashing 
about his ears the editor of the Star, the best 
newspaper in the capital, finds this to say: 

"The Crown Prince of Japan and the Prince of 
Wales are young men destined for great parts in 
world affairs. They are now qualifying for their 
work. 

' ' Last year the former took his first look around 
in the occidental world. He was everywhere most 
cordially received, and returned home informed 
and refreshed by what he had seen and heard. 
His vision, necessarily, was considerably enlarged. 

"The latter is now taking his first look aroimd in 
the oriental world. In a few days he will land in 
Japan and be the guest of the country for a month. 
The arrangements for his entertainment are elabo- 
rate, and insure him with a delightful and a profit- 
able visit. That he will retiun home informed and 
refreshed by his travels is certain. 

"The war has produced a new world, which in 
many things must be ordered in new ways. 
Young men for action ; and here are two young men 
who when they get into action and into their 
stride will be prominent and important in the 
world picture." 

91 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

But if a newspaper rigidly excludes its editor's 
opinions from its columns, it is singularly hospi- 
table to all other opinions. The President twice 
a week may edit the papers of the entire country, 
or Mr. Hughes may do it every day, — or Mr. 
Hoover or Mr. Daugherty for that matter, even 
having extended to him the privilege of anony- 
mity which editors used to keep to them- 
selves, as a device for giving force and effect to 
their ideas. 

The President "sees the press" Tuesdays and 
Fridays, volunteering information or answering 
questions. Mr. Hughes holds daily receptions. 
Everyone else big enough to break into print 
follows the same practice. 

A curious modesty prevails. Every public man 
loves to see his name in the newspapers, yet no one 
of them at these conferences will assume responsi- 
bility for what he says. All of them resort to the 
editorial practice of anonymity. 

The rule is that the correspondents must not 
quote Mr. Harding or Mr. Hughes or anyone else. 

They must not write "Mr. Harding said" or 
"Mr. Hughes said." They must print what 
Mr. Harding or Mr. Hughes said as a fact; that is, 
they must put the authority of their paper behind 
it or, if they doubt, they must assign for it "a 
high authority," thus putting the authority of 
their paper behind it at one remove. 

The editor, having excluded his own opinions 

92 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

from his news columns, opens his news columns to 
Mr. Harding's or Mr. Hughes's opinions, giving 
no guide to the reader whether he is printing fact 
or opinion, and, if obviously opinion, as to whose 
opinion it is. 

The rule is, nothing but news in the news column. 
The news is, "Mr. Harding said so and so." But 
what is printed is, "so and so is a fact" or, "so 
and so the paper believes on unimpeachable 
authority to be a fact." 

This official control of news columns goes fur- 
ther. Not only, according to the rules, must the 
source of certain information be regarded as a 
confidence but essential facts themselves may not 
be disclosed. 

One of the most remarkable uses of the news 
columns to create public opinion was that of At- 
torney-General Palmer whose several announce- 
ments of red revolution in the United States 
startled the country two years ago. A series of 
sensational plots was described. Very soon every 
intelligent correspondent felt sure that Mr. Palmer 
was largely propaganding. But to say so would 
have been to violate that law against the expression 
of opinion in news colimms, so essential to the 
truth and accuracy of our press. Moreover, if my 
memory is correct, somewhere in the series the 
Attorney-General told the press, in confidence, 
that he was putting forth his stories of revolution 
for a purpose. But one does not print confidences. 

93 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

In this case the news was that Attorney-General 
Pakner was issuing stories of discovered revolu- 
tionary plots to combat a certain radicalism in 
the labor movement. As printed it was that 
Attorney- General Palmer said — he permitted his 
name to be used — that he had discovered revolu- 
tionary plots. 

But the uncritical reader does not ask himself 
whether the Attorney-General may not be lying. 
And even if he were inclined to do so the headline 
throws him off his guard, for in the limited space 
available for captions, mere assertions tend to 
become facts. As it reached the reader's mind 
the fact that Mr. Palmer was avowedly issuing 
propaganda became the fact that evidences of a 
great Bolshevist plot against our institutions were 
being discovered almost daily. 

There are disadvantages in the official editing 
of news columns. The official does not always 
escape by shifting responsibility to the editor. 
The British during the Washington Conference 
introduced an improvement. They put out propa- 
ganda which had no authority at all. This the 
newspapers either had to leave out or to print 
on their own authority. 

Lord Riddell had "no official connection with 
the British delegation." He had moreover a per- 
fect alibi. There was Sir Arthur Willert, the 
official spokesman, who knew nothing and told 
nothing. Riddell's was a private enterprise. He 

94 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

was just a journalist willing to share with other 
journalists what information he collected. Just 
a journalist? Well, it was true that "Lloyd 
George had asked him to stay on" when he was on 
the point of departing. But that was a confidence 
and under the rules the press does not print 
confidences. 

Riddell's disclosures were perfectly timed. The 
best of them came out in the morning when after- 
noon correspondents must either rush them 
through as facts — 'they could not even say "on 
the highest authority" — or explain to their editors 
why they had been beaten by their rivals. 

Riddell is one of the British Premier's intimates. 
A lawyer ttimed newspaper proprietor, he brings 
out the News of the World, a London Sunday 
publication, sensational and trashy, of which 
3,500,000 copies or some such preposterous num- 
ber are sold. He started in during the war as a 
spokesman for the British Premier. He kept it up 
at the Paris Conference. And at Washington he 
scored his greatest success. 

What he had said at his seance was, "Now, of 
course, I don't know, but I imagine the Confer- 
ence will do thus and so." He was delightfully 
irresponsible, having no official connection. He 
could leak when he had anything to leak. He 
could guess, near the truth or far from the truth, 
for, after all, he was only "imagining." He joked. 
He indulged in buffoonery. He put out propa- 

95 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ganda when he wished. But he mixed enough 
truth with it all so that the correspondents thronged 
his meetings. So far as there was publicity at the 
Conference, he was that publicity. 

There was nothing of the great man about him. 
He did not pretend to be a statesman. He did not 
take himself seriously. He reached out for his 
public in the same undress way that he does in his 
Sunday newspaper. * ' Ex-tra-ter-ri-to-ri-al-ity , ' ' he 
would say, "that's a long word. I never heard it 
before I came here." "Kow Loon, where is the 
place anyw^ay?" You felt that for the British 
Empire these places and issues were trivialities. 

He was familiar, quite inoffensively. "The 
highly intelligent seal of the Associated Press — 
was it Mr. Hood here? — must have been under 
the table in the committee room w^hen he got this 
story. He knows more about it than I do." He 
was humorous. "The Conference means to do 
good and, according to the well known rule — what 
is it? — Oh, yes! 'Cast your bread upon the 
waters' — and by — er — a certain repercussion we 
all expect to benefit." 

It was not said cynically. It was no effort to 
be funny. It was natural and inevitable. Lord 
Riddell himself did good to the press, and by a 
certain repercussion the British Empire benefited. 
It was a publicity "stimt" that has never been 
equalled. Never before did one man have world 
opinion so much in his hands. Only Riddell's per- 

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LORD RIODELL 



LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

sonality, his friendliness, his apparent disingenu- 
ousness, his trifling, enabled him to exercise his 
power — these and the immense demand for pub- 
licity, where aside from his there was little. 

The hospitality of news columns is not extended 
to officials alone. A vast industry second only to 
that of news collecting has been built up for the 
purpose of conveying opinions to readers in the 
guise of news. Its constant growth is a proof of 
its success. 

The reason for the opening of newspaper columns 
to it is commercial. A variety of interests and 
opinions tends to reflect itself, as at Paris, in a 
multiplicity of newspapers. The American news- 
paper proprietor has avoided competition by 
steadily restricting the expression of opinion first 
in the news columns and then on the editorial 
page, so as to offend as few of his readers as pos- 
sible, and then opening his news columns to 
opinions which he could not approve on his edi- 
torial page, provided they could be disguised as 
news. 

But the faults of public opinion as a governing 
force do not spring from an uncritical journalism, 
conducted in haste and under compulsion to be in- 
teresting rather than adequate, too little edited by 
its editors and too much edited by others. The 
trouble with Therese is her lack of mind. In spite 
of her good sense and habit of giving excellent 
advice she is bornee et, si Von veut, stupide. We 
7 97 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

do not find in her what Rousseau was convinced 
he found in her, "a. deposit for substantial and 
genuine virtue." 

We know more about the public mind today 
than Jefferson did when he wrote about it. We 
have studied the psychology of the mob and we 
know that the psychology of the public is not dif- 
ferent. Like the mind of Therese, the public mind 
has never grown up ; with this difference, that the 
mind of Therese never could grow up and the 
mind of the public, we hope, will. 

The public mind is young. Only for a very few 
years in the history of the race has there been any 
such thing as a conscious public. Jefferson was 
right in thinking that its mind was not the sum of 
the individual minds: nevertheless, it is not a "de- 
posit for virtue." Men act in a mass quite dif- 
ferently from the way they act as individuals, only 
unfortunately there is not any necessary divine 
rightness about the way they act: there is often 
divine wrongness. 

We have built up the machinery for converting 
one hundred million widely scattered people into a 
public, for giving it a sense of commimity, but we 
have not at an equal rate built up a public mind. 

With the telegraph, the wireless telephone, the 
standardized press, the instant bulletin going 
everywhere, we can stir the whole people as a mob, 
make it revert into a frightened herd, but we can 
not make it think. 

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LOOKING FOR ULTIMATE WISDOM 

The public is too young to have a developed 
mind. In a hundred generations it may have one. 

This experiment in democracy is conducted in 
the faith that it will have one, that the mass of 
mankind may be lifted up so that there will be as 
much freedom of thinking in a democratic society 
as there once was in an aristocratic society. It is 
the bravest experiment in history but its success 
is afar off, Rousseau's belief in Therese to the 
contrary notwithstanding. 

In the present state of undeveloped mind and 
overdeveloped machinery of communication public 
opinion is a great negative force. It does nothing 
constructive. It can only be thoroughly aroused 
by a suggestion of danger. Statesmen are both 
afraid of it and despise it, and between contempt 
and fear are reduced to temporary expedients. 

So that when we speak of government by public 
opinion we speak of something that has been as 
badly shaken as government by business, or execu- 
tive government or party government or any one 
of the various governments upon which we once 
relied. The war has made it almost as intolerable 
as it made autocracy, as practiced by Mr. Wilson. 

Shall official Washington turn to public opinion 
as its guide? Official Washington is busy all the 
time with all the arts it used during the war shap- 
ing public opinion to its own ends. It must have 
been hard for a king's minister to believe in the 
divinity of the monarch he was gulling. And at 

99 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

any moment public opinion may belong to Mr. 
Hearst. 

This new ruler by divine right is not going to be 
so easy to dethrone as his predecessors. No new 
Rousseau will discern a new Therese. Mr. Walter 
Lippmann would set up in its place the expert by 
divine right, but the expert is a palpable pretender. 

The best hope for the present moment is per- 
haps to divide the public. Minorities based on 
interest will at least be constructive. Organized, 
they may offer an effective resistance. Out of 
them may come a development of the public mind. 

If Jefferson were writing today he might say 
that the farm bloc contained the * ' deposit for sub- 
stantial and genuine virtue." At any rate it tills 
the soil. 

If we break up the threatening mass which the 
war has taught us to fear, there might be organized 
a thinkers' bloc. Thinking in this country cer- 
tainly needs a bloc. 



100 



CHAPTER VI 

SHALL WE FIND OUR SALVATION SITTING, LIKE 
MR. MELLON, ON A PILE OF DOLLARS 

The conditions which face Mr. Harding are Hke 
those which face the administrator of a corpora- 
tion left by its old head and creator to the direc- 
tion of an incompetent son. The young man 
is the nominal master of the business. He lacks 
confidence in himself and what is worse still his 
wife and mother lack confidence in him. They 
have fortified him with a brother-in-law as a 
right hand man. His brother-in-law knows little 
of the business and can never forget that he is the 
creature of his sister and her mother-in-law. 

The administrator of this corporation wishes to 
obtain a decision upon policy. The proprieties 
require him to consult its nominal head. The 
young man, unsure of himself, must talk it over 
with the mentor whom his wife and mother have 
provided. He in turn proves no final authority 
but must discuss the question with his sister. 
Ultimately the widow who owns most of the stock 
must be approached. She hires others to run the 

lOI 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

property, wonders why they do not nrn it. The 
very fact that the others could reach no decision 
makes her cautious about reaching one herself. 
The administrator goes vainly about this circle 
seeking for a "yes" or "no." 

The government was simple when the public 
had faith in the social purposes of business and 
public opinion did not differ greatly from business 
opinion. Parties reflected the will of business. 
Authority was centered. Whether you said it 
resided in parties or in business or in public opinion 
made little difference. There was substantial 
agreement. A ' ' yes " or " no " was easy. 

Suppose Mr. Harding should be in doubt, as he 
is so often — today. He asks himself what is party 
opinion, what is business opinion, what is public 
opinion, or what is the opinion of some powerful 
minority which may turn an election against him. 

His party has no opinion; it exists by virtue of 
its capacity to think nothing about everything and 
thus avoid dissensions. Business is of two minds 
and is moreover afraid of the public. It will as- 
sume no responsibility. Public opinion, what is it? 
Mr. Hearst's newspapers? Or the rest of the 
press? Or the product of the propaganda con- 
ducted from Washington? Or something that 
Mr. Harding may create himself if he will? Minor- 
ity opinion is definite, but is it safe? Where is 
authority? 

A rettim to those happy days when authority did 

1 02 



OUR SALVATION 

center somewhere, when in conducting the busi- 
ness you did not have to run around the whole 
circle seeing the young man, his wife, his brother- 
in-law, and the widow who inherited the property, 
is our constant dream. Let us get back to party 
government, exclaimed Mr. Harding; so the na- 
tion voted to do so, only to find there were neither 
parties nor party government. 

Let us, then, it is suggested, found some new 
party that will "stand for something," that will 
synthesize in one social aim, the common element 
in the aims of various interests into which the 
coimtry is divided. But no one can point out the 
common basis, the principle which the new party 
shall advocate. 

Let us then have a better informed public opin- 
ion. Mr. Walter Lippmann in his new book upon 
the subject, despairing of the press, would put the 
making of public opinion in the hands of experts, 
collecting the truth with the impartiality of 
science. 

We seek unity as perhaps the builders of Babel 
sought it after the confusion of tongues fell upon 
them. 

One favorite hope of attaining it is through a 
new synthesis of business and politics. Govern- 
ment by business had worked. Let us return to 
Eden. Let us elect a business man President. 
One may substitute for President in this last sen- 
tence Governor or Mayor or Senator or Con- 

103 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

gressman, for whatever the office is, this re- 
cipe is always suggested. 

Thus, so it is piously hoped, we may get back to 
those good old times before we builded for our- 
selves this Babel, a government that was inde- 
pendent of business, parties that were independent 
of everything under the sun, voters that were in- 
dependent of parties, a press that was independent, 
a propaganda that was independent, and blocs that 
knew no rule but their own. 

Elect the business man to office, so it is felt, and 
you will have an important synthesis, an old and 
tried one, one that worked, business and politics. 
You will do more. You will import into public 
life all that wonderful efficiency which we read 
about in the American Magazine, that will to 
power, that habit of getting things done, that in- 
stant capacity for decision which we romantically 
associate with commercial life. All this is in the 
minds of those who urge this method of achieving 
unit}^ 

We have no greater national illusion than the 
business man illusion. In any other coimtry a 
business man is just a business man; in America 
he is a demigod. Golden words, as Mark Twain 
said, flow out of his mouth. He performs miracles. 
He has erected a great industry and amassed a large 
fortune. Therefore he would make a great public 
official. We never think of him as merely a special- 
ist having a narrow aptitude for heaping up money. 

104 



OUR SALVATION 

The reasoning about the business man is this. 
Success, real success, comes to the jack of all trades, 
a major premise handed down from pioneer days. 
"A" is a real success, for he has made several 
millions. Therefore "A" is a jack of all trades. 
Therefore he would be as great a President as he is a 
shoe button manufacturer. 

We owe the business-man illusion to the pioneers. 
In a few years they subjected a continent to our 
uses. They accumulated for themselves wealth 
such as the world had never seen. The nation 
does not think of them as the luckiest of a genera- 
tion facing such virgin resources as existed on no 
other continent, at a moment when means of trans- 
portation such as the world had never seen before, 
and machinery for manufacture without parallel 
were in their hands. The marvelous element was 
not the opportunity but the men. 

One day they were telegraphers, day laborers, 
railroad section hands and the next they were 
colossal figures of American enterprise. As their 
like existed nowhere else they became the Ameri- 
can type. They established the tradition of 
American business. 

It has been a tradition profitable to keep alive. 
The men who by luck, by picking other men's wits, 
or by the possession of a special talent, useful only 
in a society like our own, grow vastly rich, love to 
read how wonderful they are. For their delecta- 
tion a journalism has grown up to celebrate the 

105 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

epic of their marvelous industry, resourcefulness, 
efficiency, their god-like insight into the hearts of 
men; whose praises they pay for liberally in the 
disposition of advertising. Yoimg men who would 
be great read this journalism diligently looking 
for the secret of success. Reading it they resolve 
not to keep their minds upon five o'clock when the 
closing whistle blows but to become rich by in- 
dustry and thrift like its great exemplars; who 
profit by it not only in having their own 
praises sung but in getting more work out of their 
servants. 

So much virtue rests upon the business-man 
illusion that no one would lay an impious finger 
on it. I merely analyze it to exhibit the contents 
of our minds when we say "elect a business man 
President," and to present the picture of a demigod 
out of the American Magazine in the White House, 
and a new synthesis of business and politics. 

Moreover, we let oiurselves be misled by the 
habit of speaking of the "public business" and 
accepting without examination the analogy which 
the word suggests. We say to ourselves, "Well, 
since government is a business, the proper person 
to be in charge of it is a business man." But it is 
not business in any exact sense of the word. If 
the product of the operation were a mere book- 
keeping profit or even mere bookkeeping economies 
then it might properly be called a business. But 
that which business efficiency in office, if it could 

io6 



OUR SALVATION 

really be obtained, might do well, is the least part 
of self-government, whose main end must tor a long 
time be the steady building up of the democratic 
ideal. 

But the electing of business men to office does 
not build up this ideal. On the contrary it is a 
confession of failure in democracy, an admission 
that public life in it does not develop men fit for 
its tasks, that for capacity it is necessary to seek 
in another world and summon an outsider; estab- 
lish a sort of receivership in self-government. 

And it is a blind sort of receivership. We know 
little about business men except the noisy dis- 
closures of their press agents. "X" has made a 
million dollars. If we no longer say, as in the days 
of Mark Twain, that golden words flow from his 
mouth, we accept his wealth as proof positive of his 
extraordinary capacity for affairs. There is no 
going behind the fact of his vast accumulation, for 
business is conducted in secret. The law recog- 
nizes that it has to be, keeping in confidence facts 
disclosed through income tax returns. 

When we consider a successful business man 
for office no allowance can be made for the fact 
that the intelligence responsible for his success 
may not have been his as head of a successful 
organization. In no way may it be asked and 
answered whether all the original force which was in 
him may not have been spent before he is sug- 
gested for office. Senator Knox was an instance 

107 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

of spent force, his energy and ambition being gone 
when he entered pubhc Hfe. 

Luck may explain a commercial career and you 
cannot elect luck to office. Special talents which 
are valuable in making money may be out of place 
in political life. 

Moreover commercial success in America has 
been easier than anywhere else in the world. 
Opportunities are nimierous with the result that 
competition has not been keen. Nothing has been 
so over praised or so blindly praised as business 
success in this country. We may occasionally 
elect men in public life to office upon false repu- 
tations, as we did Vice-President CooHdge, credit- 
ing him with a firmness toward the Boston police 
strikers which had been shown by a subordinate in 
his absence. But at least the acts of officials are 
subject to popular scrutiny. Behind success in 
business we may not look. 

Take the case of a Middle Western corporation. 
Three quarters of its profits came from a sub- 
sidiary. The history of the subsidiary is this: 
The corporation came into possession of certain 
mineral lands through the foreclosure of a mortgage. 
A company developing a product from the mineral 
failed. The head of the corporation acquiring the 
property by foreclostire thought this product of 
little value. A subordinate felt that it could by a 
change of name and judicious advertising be 
widely sold. He had great difficulty in persuading 

1 08 



OUR SALVATION 

his employer but in the end obtained the money to 
make his experiment, whose results fully justified 
his judgment. The public seeking a business 
man for office would look no further than at the 
success of the corporation, which would be proof 
sufficient of the great talents of its head. Electing 
him they would not obtain for public service the 
mind which made the money, even if it be agreed 
that the talent for making money is a talent for 
public service. 

And this case: A great Eastern trust acquired 
possession of a piece of property in this way: It 
uses a mineral product not much found in this 
country. Some Westerners had a deposit. They 
went to the Eastern trust, which encouraged them 
and loaned them $10,000 for its development. 
They then found that the trust W' as the only market 
for the mineral and that it had no intention to buy. 
Ultimately this deposit passed to the trust by fore- 
closure of the $10,000 mortgage. The trust thus 
obtaining ownership, began mining and in the first 
year cleared $500,000 on its $10,000 investment. 
The transaction in this instance was not the work 
of a subordinate; it revealed, however, a peculiar 
talent in the head of the corporation that would 
not be serviceable in public life. 

To get down to names. Many business men 
entered the service of the government during the 
war. Almost none of them left it with enhanced 
reputations. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, who served 

109 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

in the Treasury Department, had Httle success, so 
the men who surrounded him felt. I am not able 
to assess the causes of his failure. Perhaps he had 
assigned to him an impossible task. 

Similarly men who had contact with him while 
financing the Republican campaign of 19 16 were 
disappointed. After his service at Washington he 
ceased to be head of a great Wall Street bank. 
What do these adverse circumstances mean regard- 
ing Mr. Vanderlip's fitness to be, let us say. Secre- 
tary of the Treasury? Precisely nothing, let us 
admit. And his success for a number of years in 
banking, the large fortune he accumulated, by the 
same reasoning, mean no more. 

Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business 
men, yet what the public knows about him is no- 
thing. He was the president of a great bank and 
amassed wealth. An old financial journalist, he 
has gift of speech and writing, unusual in the 
business world. His agreeable personality made 
him liked by editors. He achieved unusual pub- 
licity. Was his reputation solidly based or was it 
newspaper made? The public does not know, can- 
not know. I use his case by way of illustration. 
Perhaps he ought to be President of the United 
States. But choosing a man for office on the 
basis of his business success, even so well known 
a man as Mr. Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind 
gambling. 

We have in office now one of the great business 

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men of the country. Mr. Andrew W. Mellon, 
Secretary of the Treastiry, who is posed somewhat 
uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile 
of wealth any one has ever heaped up, except Mr. 
John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat uneasily" 
because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from 
a Congressional hearing at the Capitol, flustered 
and uncomfortable, turning to a subordinate and 
asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good 
impression?" What could a subordinate reply 
except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon, you did very 
well."? 

But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression 
on the witness stand. If he were unjustly accused 
of a crime he would hang himself by appearing in 
his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his 
stammering hesitancy not guilt but an honest 
inability to express himself. 

Mr. Mellon is the shyest and most awkward 
man who ever rose to power. He is unhappy 
before Congressional committees, before reporters 
in the dreadful conferences which are the outward 
and visible evidence of our democracy, at Cabinet 
meetings, where the fluent Mr. Hughes casts him 
terribly in the shade. 

At one such meeting the President dragged him 
forth from silence by turning to him and asking 
him, "What has the Sphinx here got to say on the 
subject." Thus impelled, the Secretary of the 
Treasury replied, unconsciously in the words of Sir 

III 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Roger de Coverley, "Well, Mr. President, I think 
there is a good deal to be said on both sides." 

If we may believe the psychologists, the great 
object of acquiring wealth and power is the achieve- 
ment of self-complacency. If it is, Mr. Mellon 
has somehow missed it. You can not imagine 
him writing himself down beside the others in the 
great American copy book and saying seriously to 
the youth of the land, "Look at me, I worked 
always fifteen minutes after the whistle blew and 
behold the result. Follow my footsteps." No 
golden words issue from his mouth. Some un- 
forgetable personal measure of his own deserts, 
some standard peculiar to himself, perhaps, refuses 
to be buried under the vast accumulations. 

Were ever great abilities so tongue-tied as this? 
I ask this question not to answer it. I merely hold 
Mr. Mellon up as the usually insoluble riddle, the 
why of great business success. But granting that 
the real Mr. Mellon is shown in the enormous 
fortune and not in the timid asking of a subordinate, 
"Did I make a good impression? " does such shrink- 
ing, such ill adaptation, on the stage of public hfe 
make a contribution to the unending drama of self- 
government? 

I take it that behind these footlights which we 
call Washington, just as behind the literal foot- 
lights, the actors, if there is to be any lifting of us 
up, must play a part with which we can identify 
ourselves in our imagination. He must be articu- 

112 




ANDREW W. MELLON, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY 



I 



OUR SALVATION 

late. He must get across. Mr. Harding does it 
admirably. You watch him and you realize that 
he is the oldest of stage heroes, Everyman. You 
say to yourself unconsciously, "Only the accident 
of seven million majority separates him from me." 
You are lifted up. Ordinary flesh and blood can 
do this great thing. 

Based on this desire to identify ourselves with 
greatness is our familiar aphorism, "The office 
makes the man." All that is necesary is the 
office to "make" the least of us. 

Roosevelt played the part even better than Mr. 
Harding, "an ordinary man raised to the nth 
power. ' ' He strutted to fill the eye. He was the 
consummation of articulateness. The point is 
that self-government must be dramatic or it does 
not carry along the self -governors. 

Of course one must not overlook the fact that 
"the great silent man " is a consolation to common 
inarticulateness and ineffectiveness, the general 
belief that where there is a slow tongue profundity 
is found being one of those pleasant things which 
we like to think about ourselves — "we could and 
we would." But after all there is a sense of pity 
about our kind attribution of hidden power to 
dullness. We are half aware that we are 
compensating. 

Anyway, even if the great business man is at 
home upon the stage, which Mr. Mellon is not, the 
calling of him to office interrupts the drama of self- 
* 113 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

government. We admit our failure and call in the 
gods from another world. It is as I have said a 
staged receivership. We can not identify our- 
selves with the hero. We are poor worms, not 
millionaires. We might have the seven million 
majority but we could not also stand upon a pile of 
seven million gold dollars. Government ceases to 
be human. It becomes superhuman. And self- 
government must be human. 

Of course, I exaggerate. Mr. Mellon coming 
from that other world is not wholly without his 
human relations. I have alluded to his symboliz- 
ing the wish-fulfilment of the inarticulate, and 
the inarticulate are many. He does more. He 
fits admirably into what Mr. Walter Lippmann has 
called in his new book one of otir popular stereo- 
types. We demand a conflict between reality and 
the stage. We like to see the masks pulled off our 
actors. One of our best received traditions is that 
a man who has a fight with the politicians has 
performed a great service. We like to see our 
strutters strut in a little fear of us. 

But Secretary Mellon's defeat of Representative 
Fordney, Senator Elkins, and Elmer Dover in their 
efforts to fill his department with politicians was 
not so much a sign of power as a measiu*e of the 
difference between Mr. Mellon's world and theirs. 

Mr. Mellon comes into the Treasury from his 
bank. All he knows is banking, not politics. If 
he went from the Mellon Bank to the National 

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OUR SALVATION 

City Bank of New York he would not discharge 
all the National City Bank employees and bring in 
a lot of men who had never seen the inside of a bank 
before, whom he did not know, who didn't speak 
the same language that, he did. It is only in politics 
that one finds such perfect faith in man as man. 

He goes to one young Democrat in the Depart- 
ment — this actually happened — and he says, 
"Young man, I like your work. I want you to 
stay with me." "Ah, but, Mr. Mellon, I can't," 
plead this Democrat, "You really can't do things 
that way. It is not done. You will have all the 
Republican politicians about yotir ears." 

But it was not a sense of power in Mr. Mellon 
that made him thus defy the conventions. It was 
merely the instinct of self -protect ion. He could 
not live in the atmosphere of politics. He had to 
do things as he always had done them. The Gods 
coming down from high Oljrmpus among the sons 
and daughters of men were probably never as much 
at ease as the Greeks made them out to be. 

With his millions behind him Mr. Mellon was a 
solid object in his conflict with the politicians. 
Without them one does not know what would have 
happened between him and Mr. Fordney, Mr. 
Elkins, and Mr. Dover. 

What is a good Secretary of the Treasury? We 
have a stereotype about that, too, one slowly and 
painfully formed. A good Secretary of the Treas- 
ury is one who has seen the inside of a bank, who 

115 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

has read the books on finance and knows the rules. 
Originally our Secretaries of the Treasury were 
amateurs, like our generals who beat ploughshares 
into swords. When one got into trouble, he 
boarded the Congressional Limited for New York 
and saw Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan came out of 
his bank holding the safety of the nation in his 
hands, exhibiting it to reporters who wrote all 
about it, assuring the public. 

At length it was decided to keep the safety of the 
nation at Washington. And our Secretaries of the 
Treasury tended to become professional. The 
young men who tell us whether w^e have a good 
Secretary of the Treasury or not are the financial 
writers of the newspapers. The Secretary acts. 
The young men look in the books and see that he 
has conformed to the rules. When he has he 
leaves nothing to be desired as Secretary. 

Mr. Mellon's relation to Alexander Hamilton is 
the same as Marshal Foch's relation to Napoleon; 
one knew war from his own head, the other knows 
it from the teachers. Mr. Mellon's administration 
is not inspired. In the greatest financial crisis in 
our history he has no constructive suggestion to 
make. You would hardly know that Secretary 
Houston was gone and Mr. Mellon had come. 
And there is an explanation for this continuity, 
beside that of the rule books. The hard work of 
the Department has been done under both adminis- 
trations by Assistant Secretary S. P. Gilbert, for 

Ii6 



OUR SALVATION 

Mr. Mellon has the successful man's habit of 
leaning heavily upon an able and industrious sub- 
ordinate. Mr. Gilbert is an ambitious young 
lawyer who has mastered the books and who works 
1 8 hours a day. The voice is the voice of Mellon 
but the hand is the hand of Gilbert. 

I have analyzed Mr. Mellon at Washington 
although only a small fraction of his career is in- 
volved and although he operates in the difficult 
circumstances of an unknown and unfavorable 
environment. But he is perceptible in Washing- 
ton, he does appear before Congressional Com- 
mittees and at newspaper conferences. You can 
study the Gilberts who surround him. You can 
estimate the prepossessions that enter into our 
judgment of him. You can measure him against 
the standard of public life. 

In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged 
about with the secrecy of business. He is to be 
seen only through the golden aura of a great for- 
tune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, 
the product of forces and personalities which can 
only be guessed at. 

He was the son of a banker and inherited a con- 
siderable fortune. He operated in a city which 
expanded fabulously in the course of his lifetime. 
If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a 
brother who has that force of personality which we 
usually associate with fitness for life. His bank v/as 
the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the 

117 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

pioneer demigods, who could make the business rep- 
utations of men who proved adaptable to his uses. 

Thus into the result there enters the power of 
Frick, the thrust upward of Pittsburg, an industrial 
volcano, the associated personality of the other 
Mellon. You have to give a name to all this 
combination of favoring circumstances and favor- 
ing personalities and names are usually given 
arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew 
W. Mellon. But how much of it is Andrew W. 
Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how much 
of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an 
electorate seeking a business man for office can not 
^top to inquire and can not learn if it does inquire. 

If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to 
office they do not enlist in the public service the 
combination of persons and forces which is known 
by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, 
measured by his great fortune, perhaps they get 
him after he has spent his force or after his head is 
turned by success, or at any rate they put him into 
an imfamiliar milieu and subject him to that 
corrupting temptation, the desire for a second term 
or for a higher office. 

And to go back to what I have said before, they 
make self-government go into bankruptcy and ask 
for a receiver. 

The great business-man President is just a 
romantic development of the great business-man 
illusion. 

ii8 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET, AND WHAT 
IS IN THE BOTTLE 

Mr. Mellon's associates in the Cabinet were 
most of them chosen on substantially the same 
principles as he was, namely, that success in busi- 
ness or professional life implies fitness for public 
life. We have no other standard. The present 
Cabinet is an "exceptionally good" Cabinet. 
Many of its members are millionaires. 

Some of them owe their place to the rule that 
those who help elect a President are entitled to 
the honor, the advertising, or the "vindication," 
of high public office. 

That is to say, the same considerations that rule 
in the selection of Senators rule in their selection. 
They were recruited from the class from which 
Senators are recruited. I can not say the mental 
level of the Cabinet is above that of the Senate. 
Take out of the upper house its two strongest 
members, its two weakest, and half a dozen of the 
average sort, and you construct a body in every 

119 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

way equal to the Cabinet of Mr. Harding in intelli- 
gence and public morals. 

Most of them, never having been members of 
the upper house, have not suffered from the de- 
preciation in the public eye which attends service 
in the legislative branch. They come rather from 
the wonderful business world. 

There are, moreover, few of them compared to 
Senators. Smallness of numbers suggests careful 
selection, superior qualifications. 

And the secrecy of Cabinet meetings makes 
them impressive. If reporters were present, the 
public would realize that the Cabinet as a Cabinet 
was mostly occupied with little things. 

The records prove it. 

The biweekly meetings of the Cabinet are com- 
monly followed by the annoimcement : "The 
Cabinet had a short session today. Nothing of 
importance was discussed"; or, "Details of ad- 
ministration were discussed." Now, of course, 
reasons of state may occasionally restrain the 
disclosure of what actually was the subject before 
the Cabinet. Yet Mr. Harding's administration 
has been in office more than a year, and how many 
important policies has it adopted? How much 
wisdom has emerged from the biweekly meetings? 

Sample announcements of the Cabinet meetings 
run like this: "The Cabinet listened to the Post- 
master General, explaining how much it would 
facilitate the handling of the mails if people would 

120 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

distribute the mailing of their letters throughout 
the day, instead of keeping most of them to mail 
late in the afternoon when they are leaving their 
offices. The Postmaster General pointed out that 
the government departments were offenders in 
this respect." Useful; but why should the whole 
nation worry about who advises with the President 
over the inveterate bad habits of the people as 
letter writers? 

Or this: ''The Cabinet spent an hour and a 
half today discussing what to do with the property 
left in the government's hands by the war. There 
are millions of dollars' worth of such property." 
A mere detail of administration, but it came be- 
fore the Cabinet as a whole because more than one 
department was left in control of the property. 

Moreover, you may estimate the importance of 
cabinets from the fact that, after all, every admin- 
istration takes its color from the President. Mr. 
Wilson's administration was precisely Mr. Wilson. 
Mr. Harding's is precisely Mr. Harding. 

Listen to the experience of a Cabinet adviser. 
One of the most important Secretaries was explain- 
ing to some friends a critical situation. "But," 
interjected one of the listeners, ''does President 
Harding understand that?" "The President," 
replied the Secretary, "never has time really to 
imder stand anything." 

And remember how Secretary Hughes told the 
President that the Four Power Pact covered with 

121 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

its guarantees the home islands of Japan, and how 
a couple of days later Mr. Harding informed the 
press that it did not cover the home islands of 
Japan; when it transpired that the information of 
Mr. Hughes on this point had effected no lodge- 
ment in the President's mind. 

The Presidential mind; that is the bottle neck 
through which everything has to pass. 

Suppose we had today the greatest statesman 
that this country has ever produced as Secretary 
of State. Let us say Alexander Hamilton, for 
example. What could Alexander Hamilton do as 
the head of Mr. Harding's Cabinet? We shall 
assume that Alexander Hamilton had the mind to 
grasp the problem of this country's relations to the 
world and of its interest in the world's recovery 
from the havoc and the hatreds of the war, and the 
constructive imagination to reach a solution of it. 
What could Alexander Hamilton do? His avenue 
of approach to world problems would be Mr. 
Harding. All that was in the mind of Alexander 
Hamilton, Secretary of State, would have to pass 
through the mind of Warren G. Harding, Presi- 
dent, before it would become effective. 

The passage through would be blocked by many 
obstacles, for Mr. Harding has a perfectly conven- 
tional mind; that is why he is President. One of 
the pictures in Mr. Harding's head is the mechanis- 
tic, the God's Time picture. "Things left to 
themselves will somehow come out all right." 

122 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

Another is the racial inferiority complex. "Man is 
inadequate to attempt control of his own destiny. 
There are the forces to be considered." A third 
is the great business-man illusion. Mr. Morgan 
going abroad to consider reparations may accom- 
plish the wonders which mere statesmen can not. 
All these induce avoidance of responsibility, and 
Mr. Harding has the human liking for avoiding 
responsibility. Pressed by Mr. Hamilton, Mr. 
Harding would say: "But I can not move the 
Senate." Pressed further, he wotild say : "There 
is Public Opinion. We shall lose the election if we 
become involved in European affairs. You and 
I know those Allied war debts are worthless, but 
how can we make the people realize that they are 
worthless?" 

Like the rest of us, Mr. Harding perhaps has 
none of these pictures so firmly in his head as be- 
fore the war; but the damage to the pictures only 
makes him more vacillating. I am assuming in 
all this that Mr. Hamilton has a free mind, which 
he had, relatively, when he operated a century 
and a half ago. At that time he had not to think 
much of Public Opinion or of parties. And the 
mechanistic theory of Progress, that things come 
out all right with the least possible himian inter- 
vention or only the intervention of the business 
man, had not then assumed its present importance. 

"Mind," says a nameless writer in the London 
Nation, "is incorrigibly creative." It has created 

123 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

so many vast illusions like those above in the 
last century and a half that like the American 
spirit in Kipling's poem: 

" Elbowed out by sloven friends, 
It camps, at sufferance, on the stoop." 

Where our actual Secretary's mind falls short of 
otir supposititious Secretary's mind is in the valu- 
able quality of common sense. I am even prepared 
to maintain that as a measure of reality Mr. 
Hughes's mind is distinctly inferior to Mr. Hard- 
ing's, which is one reason why he never did become 
President and Mr. Harding did. I can not better 
explain what I mean than on the basis of this 
quotation from a recent book of Mr. Orage, the 
British critic: 

' * Common sense is the community of the senses 
or faculties; in its outcome it is the agreement of 
their reports. A thing is said to be common sense 
when it satisfies the heart, the mind, the emotion 
and all the senses ; when, in fact, it satisfies all our 
various criteria of reality." 

Mr. Hughes has only one criterion of reality, 
his mind, which has been developed at the expense 
of all his other means of approach to the truth. 
He lives in a region of facts, principles, and logical 
deductions. He does not sense an3rthing. And 
only men who sense reality have common sense. 
For Mr. Hughes facts are solid; you can make 
two nice, orderly little piles of them and build a 

124 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

logical bridge over the interval between them. A 
true statesman builds a bridge resting on nothing 
palpable, and nevertheless he crosses over it. 

Mr. Hughes's mind operates in a region of per- 
fect demonstration; he even demonstrates things 
to himself. A true statesman never succeeds in 
demonstrating anything to himself ; he uses demon- 
stration only in dealing with others. Yet he 
arrives in other than logical ways at a sureness for 
himself which is never Mr. Hughes's. For the 
Secretary of State statesmanship is an intellectual 
exercise, for the true statesman it is the exercise 
of a dozen other faculties. An extraordinary but 
limited mind, Mr. Hughes impresses us as the boy 
lightning calculator does, and leaves us unsatisfied. 

Take Mr. Hughes's handling of Mexican rela- 
tions as an example of what I have called states- 
manship made a purely intellectual exercise. The 
practical result which was to be desired when Mr. 
Hughes took office was stability and order in Mex- 
ico, the safety of American property there, and a 
restoration of diplomatic intercourse. 

Mr. Hughes does not seek to obtain these re- 
sults . Instead he works out the following problem : 
a -\- b = c, in which a is the fact that Carranza had 
issued a decree making possible the confiscation of 
American property in Mexico, b is the principle of 
international law that at the basis of relations 
between peoples must be safety of alien property, 
and c is a note to Mexico. 

125 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Mr. Hughes was excited over the perfection of 
this intellectual operation. He read his note with 
all the jubilance of the Greek philosopher who, 
having discovered an important principle of 
physics, exclaimed: ** Eureka." Mr. Hughes's 
Eureka is always a piece of paper. He is a lawyer 
whose triimiphs are briefs and contracts. 

Now the facts were not merely that Carranza 
had made an offensive gesture, issuing the famous 
decree ; but that Mexico had not confiscated Ameri- 
can property and lived in such fear of her strong 
neighbor that she was never likely to do so, that 
the Mexican supreme court had ruled confiscation 
to be illegal, that the Obregon government was as 
stable and as good a government as Mexico was 
likely to have, and that it was to our interest to 
support it morally rather than encourage further 
revolution there. They all pointed to recognition. 

The validity of the piece of paper that Mr. 
Hughes demanded of Obregon would rest upon 
international law. But so did the validity of our 
right to have our property in Mexico respected. 
We should not be in any stronger legal position to 
intervene in Mexico if she violated the contract 
Mr. Hughes wanted, than if she violated our 
property rights there unfortified by such a piece of 
paper. Both rested on one and the same law. 

Furthermore, Mexico being weak and sensitive, 
an arbitrary demand that she "take the pledge," 
such as Mr. Hughes made, was sure to offend her 

126 



BOTTLE NECK OF 1"HE CABINET 

pride, and delay the consummation everyone 
wished — stabiHty across the border and a restora- 
tion of good relations. Yet Mr. Hughes was im- 
mensely satisfied with his intellectual exercise 
a -\- b = c, c being not a solution of the Mexican 
problem, which at this writing is still afar off, but 
a piece of paper, a note to Mexico. The sheer 
logical triimiph of the deduction of c from a and b 
is to Mr. Hughes an end in itself. 

Now, of course, it is not wholly overdevelopment 
of mind at the expense of the other criteria of 
reality which leads Mr. Hughes to vain exercises 
like a -^ b = c. He has what a recent writer has 
described as "an inflamed legal sense." He has, 
moreover, by an association of ideas all his own 
oddly transferred to law that sacredness with which 
he was brought up to regard the Bible. "Sanctity 
of contracts," is his favorite phrase, the word 
"sanctity" being highly significant. He has, be- 
sides, Mr. Harding over him, and the Senate to 
reckon with. And in the case of Mexico he has 
as a fellow Cabinet member, Mr. Fall, the picture 
in whose head is of a "white man" teaching a 
"greaser" to respect him. He has to think of 
winning elections, of his own political ambitions. 
All these inhibitory influences which generally pro- 
duce negation do not estop Mr. Hughes. His mind 
is too vigorous for that. It pursues its way 
energetically to results, such as a -{- b = c. 

Now, of course, the handling of Mexican rela- 

127 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

tions is not Mr. Hughes's major achievement. But 
even his major achievement, the Washington con- 
ference with its resultant nine pieces of paper, was 
more or less a lawyer's plea in avoidance. 

The major problem which confronted Mr. 
Hughes was this: The Great War had been fol- 
lowed, as Mr. H. G. Wells aptly says, by the Petty 
Peace. It was threatening, and still threatens, 
to flame up again. The problem of a real peace 
confronted Mr. Hughes, because Mr. Wilson had 
sought to establish one and failed, and had thus 
set a certain standard of effort for his successor. 
Moreover, Mr. Hughes had said that every man, 
woman, and child in the United States was 
vitally interested in the economic recovery of 
Europe. 

Mr. Hughes had either to face this task or divert 
the mind of the court to some other issue. He 
chose to find his a -\- b = c elsewhere. The prob- 
lem of establishing peace where there was war was 
difficult ; perhaps it was too hard for any man, but 
has not humanity — I say humanity because it is 
Mr. Harding's favorite word — has not humanity 
the right to ask of its statesmen something more 
than timidity and avoidance? The problem of 
establishing peace where there was peace, in the 
Orient, was relatively easy. 

The war had left the great sea powers with ex- 
cessive navies and insupportable naval budgets. 
All wanted naval limitation. It was only neces- 

128 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

sary to propose an agreement for reduction to have 
it accepted- 
Even the dramatic method of making the pro- 
posal, with details of the tonnage to be scrapped, 
was not Mr. Hughes's idea. Let us do the man in 
the White House justice. He conceived it on the 
Mayflower, read it to Senator James Watson who 
was with him, and wirelessed it to the State 
Department. 

There was the further problem, the Anglo- 
Japanese Alliance. Mr. Hughes wanted it ended. 
Japan and England wanted it substituted by a 
compact which should be signed by its two 
signatories and the United States. 

All that Mr. Hughes had to do to establish peace 
where there was peace was to offer an agreement 
upon naval armament and accept the Anglo- 
Japanese plan for a wider pact in the Pacific. The 
details would involve discussion, but the success 
of the general program was assured in advance. 

The conference was called, hurriedly, because, 
as Mr. Harding once explained, if he had not 
hastened someone else would have anticipated him 
in calling it. This shows how obvious was the ex- 
pedient. The idea of naval limitation was no 
more original than the idea of the conference. 
Mr. Borah had proposed it. Lord Lee had pro- 
posed it, in the British Parliament. The idea of 
the Four Power Pact was made in England — it 
had long been discussed there — and brought over 
5 129 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

by Mr., now Lord, Balfour. He laid it at Mr. 
Hughes's feet. 

Mr. Balfour sought no triumphs. They should 
all go to Mr. Hughes. He has the art of incon- 
spicuousness, the result of many generations of 
fine breeding. As you saw him in the plenary 
sessions clutching the lapels of his coat with both 
hands and modestly strugghng for utterance after 
an immense flow of words from otu- chief delegate, 
you could not help feeling patriotic pride in the 
contrast. 

Besides, Mr. Balfour was captivated. He be- 
came, for the nonce, perfectly American. Mr. 
H. Wickham Steed said to me, hearing the chief 
British delegate speak: "It is a new Balfoin- at 
this conference." Certainly as you heard the 
voice, moved and moving, emotional perhaps for 
the first time in his life, you realized that it was 
not Mr. Balfour, "proceeding on his faded way" 
as the London Nation expressed it, who was speak- 
ing. It was Mr. Balfour as he might be at a great 
revival meeting, such as Mr. Hughes in his youth 
must have often attended. 

On the Four Power Pact the best comment ever 
made was Mr. Frank Simonds's, "It was invented 
to save the British Empire from committing 
bigamy." 

The results of the Washington conference were 
substantial. They put off war where none was 
threatening. Perhaps in the longer future they 

130 




ARTHUR BALFOUR 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

will be seen to be no more than a prolongation of 
the intent of the Versailles treaty, confirming the 
dichotomy of powers which that instrument 
created. GeiTnany, Russia, and China were 
treated as outsiders in both conferences. 

But the great a -\- b = c of. last winter left peace 
where there is war still unwritten. The problem 
which "himianity" posed to Mr. Hughes is as yet 
unattempted. It is as exigent as ever. Im- 
mensely plausible as he is, events have a way of 
overtaking him. Remembering what happened on 
election night in 191 6, I think one cannot sum him 
up better than by saying that he has the habit of 
always being elected in the early returns. As in 
the case of the lightning calculator, after you have 
recovered from your first surprise at his mental 
exhibition you are inclined to ask, "But what is 
the good of it all?" 

The two most important advisers to the Presi- 
dent in the existing Cabinet are Mr. Hughes and 
Mr. Hoover. The limitations of the Secretary of 
State are the limitations of a legalistic mind. The 
limitations of Mr. Hoover are the limitations of a 
scientific mind. Men, considered politically, do 
not behave like mathematical factors nor like 
chemical elements. 

Someone asked Mr. Hoover recently why he sent 
corn to Russia instead of wheat. "Because," re- 
plied the Secretary of Commerce without a mo- 
ment's hesitation, "for one dollar I can buy so 

131 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

many calories" — carrying it out to the third 
decimal place — "in com, and only so many" — 
again to the third decimal place — "in wheat. I get 
about twice as many in corn as in wheat." 

Mr. Hoover is at his best in feeding a famished 
population. He then has men where he wants 
them — I say this without meaning to reflect upon 
Mr. Hoover's humanitarian impulses; perhaps I 
should better say he then has men where for the 
free operation of his scientific mind he requires to 
have them. For in a famine men become mere 
chemical retorts. You pour into them a certain 
number of calories. Oxidization produces a cer- 
tain energy. And the exact energy necessary to 
sustain life is calculable. 

In a famine men cease to be individuals. They 
can not say, ' ' I never ate com. I do not know how 
to cook corn. I do not like com." They behave 
in perfectly calculable ways. So many calories, 
oxidization ; so much energy. 

Conceive a society in which results were always 
calculable: so many men, so much fuel, so much 
consequent horsepower, and Mr, Hoover would 
make for it an admirable benevolent dictator; for 
he is benevolent. If Bolshevism at its most com- 
plete exemplification had been a success and be- 
come the order of the world, Mr. Hoover might 
have made a great head of a state ; with labor con- 
scripted and food conscripted, all you would have 
to do would be to apply the food, counted in 

132 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

calories, to the labor, and production in a readily 
estimable quantity would ensue. I am not trying 
to suggest that this represents Mr. Hoover's ideal 
of society; it surely does not. I am only saying 
that this is the kind of society in which Mr. Hoover 
would develop his fullest utility. 

Science inevitably reduces man to the calculable 
automaton, otherwise it can deduce no laws about 
him; — such as, for example, the legal man, a fic- 
tion that haunts Mr. Hughes's brain; the chemical 
retort man, of Mr. Hoover's mind; the economic 
man, another convenient fiction; the scientific 
socialism man, another pure fiction, derived from 
the economic man and forming the basis for 
Bolshevism at its fullest development. 

Now if Chemistry should somehow acquire 
eccentricity, so that two elements combined in a 
retort would sometimes produce one result and 
sometimes another totally different, the chemist 
would be no more unsure in his mind than is Mr. 
Hoover, operating for the first time in a society of 
free, self-governing men. Or perhaps it would be a 
better analogy to say that if the chemist when he 
put an agent into a retort could not be sure what 
other elements were already in it, and could not 
tell whether the result would be an explosion or a 
pleasant and useful recombination, he would be 
somewhat in the position of Mr. Hoover. 

You will observe that I am trying to dissociate 
the real Hoover from the myth Hoover, always a 

133 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

difficult process, which may require years for its 
accomplishment. I do not pretend that this is the 
final dissociation. All we know with certainty of 
the real Hoover is that when he has society at the 
starvation line and can say "so many calories, so 
much energy," he works with extraordinary 
sureness. 

When he operates in a normal society he takes 
his chemical agent in hand and consults Mr. 
Harding, Mr. Daugherty, or Mr. Weeks as to what 
agents there are in the political retort, and whether 
the placing of his agent in with them will produce 
an explosion or a profitable recombination. 

So you see the practical utility of his mind is 
conditioned upon the minds of Mr. Harding, 
Mr. Weeks, and Mr. Daugherty. It is a fertile 
mind, which invents, however, only minor chemi- 
cal reactions, neither he nor Mr. Harding being 
sure enough about the dirty and incalculable 
vessel of politics to know when an explosion may 
result, and neither of them being bold enough to 
take chances. 

Mr. Hughes, Mr. Hoover, and Mr. Daugherty 
are the only outstanding figures in the Cabinet. 
The Attorney General lives in an unreal world of 
his own, which at the moment of this writing 
threatens to come tumbling down about his head. 

The clue to Mr. Daugherty' s world is found in a 
sentence of Thomas Felder's letter apropos of the 
failure to collect the $25,000 fee for securing the 

134 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

release of Charles W. Morse from prison, in which 
he tells how he associated with himself Mr. 
Daugherty, "who stood as close to the President 
as any other lawyer or citizen of the United 
States." ''Standing close," men may laugh at 
the gods, may "take the cash and let the credit 
go." It is a world of little things without any to- 
morrow. Long views and large views do not mat- 
ter. Forces? Principles? Perhaps, but the main 
thing is all men should "stand close." It is an 
immensely human world, where men if they are not 
masters of their own destiny may at least cheat 
fate for a little brief hour, if only they remain true 
to each other no matter what befalls. 

Mr. Harding, one side of him belongs to that 
world of Mr. Daugherty 's, while another side be- 
longs to that larger political world where morals, 
wrapped in vague sentimental words, hold sway. 
It is because he belongs to that world that Mr. 
Daugherty is Attorney General. Mr. Daugherty 
' ' stood close ' ' to Mr. Harding all his Hf e. * ' Stand- 
ing close" creates an obligation. Mr. Harding, 
as President, must in return "stand close" to 
Mr. Daugherty. 

He does so. To the caller who visited him when 
the Morse-Felder letters were coming out daily, 
and who was apprehensive of the consequences, 
the President said, "You don't know Harry 
Daugherty. He is as clean and honorable a man 
as there is in this country." In such a world as 

135 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

this, your friend can do no wrong. Goldstein, 
who received the $2,500 from Lowden's campaign 
manager, belongs to it. Therefore, he can do no 
wrong. Therefore, his name goes from the White 
House to the Senate for confirmation as Collector 
of Internal Revenue at St. Louis. 

To go back to the time before he became At- 
torney General, Daugherty practiced law in 
Columbus, Ohio. His cases came to him, largely 
as the Morse retainer did, because he "stood close " 
to somebody, to the President, to Senators, to 
Governors of Ohio, or Legislatures of Ohio. His 
was not a highly lucrative practice, for Mr. 
Daugherty is one of the few relatively poor men in 
the present Cabinet. You may deduce from this 
circumstance a conclusion as favorable as that 
which the President, who knows him soweU, does. 
I am concerned only in presenting the facts. At 
least Mr. Daugherty did not grow rich out of 
"standing close." 

Nor did he accumulate a reputation. When 
men "stand close" those who are outside the 
circle invariably regard them with a certain sus- 
picion. Your professional politician, for that is 
what Daugherty was, always is an object of doubt. 
And for this reason he always seeks what is techni- 
cally known as a "vindication." Conscious of his 
own rectitude, as he measures it, he may come out 
of office cleared in the world's eyes, and with a 
fine title, to boot, ready for life upon a new level. 

136 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

And this "vindication" sometimes does take 
place. 

I have no doubt that Mr. Daugherty entered 
office with the most excellent intentions. He had 
everything to gain personally from "making a 
record" in the Attorney Generalship, a title and a 
higher standing at the bar. Moreover, he was the 
loyal friend of the President and desired the success 
of the administration. 

But it is not so easy. You cannot one moment 
by "standing close" laugh at the gods and the 
next range yourself easily and commodiously on 
the side of the gods. The gods may be unkind 
even to those who mean to be with them from the 
outset, establishing their feet firmly upon logic 
or upon calories; how much more so may they be 
with those who would suddenly change sides? 

At least it is a matter that admits of no com- 
promise. What is he going to do in office with 
those who "stood close" to him as he "stood 
close ' ' to President Taf t ? All the ' ' close standers ' ' 
turn up in Washington. For example, Mr. Felder, 
who "stood close" in the Morse case and who 
perhaps for that reason appears as counsel in the 
Bosch-Magneto case, where the prosecution moves 
slowly, and who moreover permits himself some 
indiscretions. There is a whole army of "close 
standers." There are the prosecutions that move 
slowly. Neither circumstance is necessarily signi- 
ficant. There are always the "close standers." 

137 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Prosecutions always move slowly. But the two 
circumstances together ! 

I present all this merely to show what kind of 
adviser the Attorney General is, his limited con- 
ception of life on this little world, and life's, per- 
haps temporary, revenge upon him. No one at 
this writing can pass judgment, so I give, along 
with the facts and the appearances, the best testi- 
monial that a man can have, that quoted above 
from the President. 

In physique the Attorney General is burly, 
thick-necked, his eyes are imsteady, his face 
alternately jovial and minatory, — I should say he 
bluffed effectively, — rough in personality, a physi- 
cal law requiring that bodies easily cemented to- 
gether, and thus "standing close," should not have 
too smooth an exterior. His view of the world 
being highly personal, his instinctive idea of office 
is that it, too, is personal, something to be used, 
always within the law, to aid friends and punish 
enemies. He wrote once to a newspaper, which 
was opposing his appointment, in substance that 
he would be Attorney General in spite of it and that 
he had a long memory. 

Secretary of War Weeks is the only other 
general adviser of Mr. Harding in the Cabinet. 
He is politically minded. Like Mr. Harding he is 
half of the persuasion of Mr. Daugherty about 
organization, and half of the other persuasion 
about the sway of moral forces. All in all he is 

138 




ATTORNEY-GENERAL H. M . DAUGHERTY 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

nearer akin mentally to the President than any 
other member of the Cabinet, but with more in- 
dustry and more capacity for details than his 
chief. He is of the clean desk tradition; Mr. 
Harding is not. 

Half politician and half business man, he inter- 
prets business to the politician, and politics to 
business. He is a middle grounder. He quit 
banking satisfied with a moderate fortune, say- 
ing, "The easiest thing I ever did was to make 
money." 

His bland voice and mild manner indicate the 
same moderation in everything that he showed 
in making money ; his narrowing eyes, the caution 
which led him to quit banking when he went into 
politics. 

Politics intrigues him, but he has not a first- 
class mind for it, as his experiences in Massa- 
chusetts proved. 

Frank to the utmost limits his caution will per- 
mit, people like him, but not passionately. Men 
respect his ability, but they do not feel strongly 
about it. He never becomes the center of con- 
troversy, as Daugherty is, as Hoover has been, and 
as Hughes may at any time be. I have never 
seen him angry. I have seen him enthusiastic. A 
Laodicean in short. 

Secretary Fall hoped to be one of the chief 
advisers, but has been disappointed. Mr. Harding 
had said of him, "His is the best mind in the 

139 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Senate," but he has found other minds more to 
his Hking in the Cabinet. 

With a long drooping mustache, he looks like a 
stage sheriff of the Far West in the movies. His voice 
is always loud and angry. He has the frontiers-man's 
impatience. From his kind lynch law springs. 

He wanted to lynch Mexico. When he entered 
the Cabinet he said to his Senate friends, "If 
they don't follow me on Mexico I shall resign." 
He has been a negative rather than a positive force 
there regarding Mexico, deviating Mr. Hughes into 
the ineffective position he occupies. 

He has the frontiers-man's impatience of con- 
servation. Probably he is right. His biggest 
contribution to his coimtry's welfare will be oil 
land leases, like that of Teapot Dome. 

The Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Wallace, is an 
excellent technical adviser, as unobtrusive as 
experts usually are. 

The Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Denby, with his 
flabby jowls and large shapeless mouth, has a big 
heart, and more enthusiasm than he has self- 
command, judgment, or intelligence. He com- 
mitted political suicide cheerfully, when the 
Cannon machine in the House fell into disfavor. 
He would do anything for a friend, not as Mr. 
Daugherty would because it pays, but because he 
is a friend. A cause commands an equal loyalty 
from him. Just because his head is not as big as 
his heart he is a minor factor. 

140 



BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET 

Mr. Davis, Secretary of Labor, is a professional 
glad hand man, appointed because the admin- 
istration meant to extend nothing to Labor but a 
glad hand. When a crisis presents itself in in- 
dustrial relations, Mr. Hoover, who spreads him- 
self over several departments, attends to it. At 
the conference on unemployment, which was 
Mr. Hoover's, the best and only example of the 
unemployed present was the Secretary of Labor. 



141 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR OF MUCH 
LITTLENESS 

We have a form of government suited to effect 
the will of a simple primitive people, a people with 
one clear aim. When we are all of one mind the 
government works. The executive represents the 
general intention, Congress represents the same 
intention. The party in power owes its position 
to the thoroughness with which it expresses the 
common purpose. Or, if you go back further, the 
structure of business serves the same social aim. 

Now, under such circimistances, it makes little 
difference where authority resides, whether there 
is government by business, or government by par- 
ties, or executive domination, or whether Congress is 
the ruling branch. The result is the same, the single 
purpose of the community finds its just expression. 

And so it was in the blessed nineties to which 
Mr. Harding would have us return. The people 
were united upon one end, the rapid appropriation 
of the virgin wealth of this continent and its dis- 
tribution among the public, and they had no doubt 

142 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

this was being admirably accomplished by the 
existing business structure. Parties and govern- 
ments were subsidiary. The system worked. 

In a pioneer society waste is unimportant; it 
may even be economy. Forests are cut and all but 
the choicest wood thrown away. They are not 
replanted. While they are so plentiful it would be 
a waste of time and effort to use the poor timber or 
to replace the felled trees. 

In a similar society faulty distribution, which 
is ordinarily a social waste, is unimportant. There 
is plenty for all. And it may even be a waste of 
time and effort, checking accomplishment, to seek 
better adjustments. The object of society is the 
rapid exploitation of the resources nature has made 
available. Everyone gains in the process. Justice 
is a detail, as much a detail as is the inferior timber 
left to rot. 

We no longer have the unity of aim of a pioneer 
society, yet we have not readjusted our actual 
government in conformity with the altered social 
consciousness. Instead we are trying to readjust 
ourselves to a practice that is outworn. Having 
ceased to be pioneers, becoming various and 
healthily divided, instead of making our system 
express the new variety in our life, and still func- 
tion, we are trying to force ourselves by heavy- 
penalties and awful bugaboos back into that unity 
tmder which our system does work. 

And when I say that we have a form of govem- 

143 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

ment suited only to a pioneer society, though we 
have ceased to be a pioneer society, let no one think 
that I would lay a profane hand upon that vener- 
ated instrument, the Constitution of the United 
States. I am thinking only of the Constitution's 
boasted elasticity. A new stretching is required, to 
fit a larger and more diversified society than that to 
which we have hitherto applied it. 

For a simple, primitive people, for a pioneer 
society with but one task to accomplish, — the 
appropriation and distribution of the tmdeveloped 
resources of a continent, — details of distribution 
being unimportant where natural wealth was so 
vast, government by business or government b}^ 
parties as the agents of business served admirably. 
The essential luiity which is not to be found in our 
government of divided powers existed in the single 
engrossing aim of the public. 

For a temporary end, like the common defense, 
against an external enemy or against an imagined 
internal enemy, concentration upon the Executive 
also serves. The imity of purpose which the nation 
has is imported into the government through ele- 
vating the President into a dominant position. In 
the one case the government is made to work by 
putting all branches of it under control of one au- 
thority outside itself; in the other, by upsetting the 
nice balance which the Fathers of the Constitution 
set up and, under the fiction of party authority, 
resorting to one man Government. 

144 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

But what happens when there ceases to be a 
single aim, when the fruits of the earth are no 
longer sufficient to go around generously so that 
no one need question his share, when a conflict of 
interests arises, when classes begin to emerge, when 
in short we have the situation which exists in 
America today? 

Let us examine for a moment the Executive as a 
source of unity in the government of such a diver- 
gent society. To make him executive minorities 
must agree upon him. He must, to use Mr. Hard- 
ing as an illustration, be satisfactory to the farmers 
with one point of view and to Wall Street with 
another, he must be acceptable to the Irish Amer- 
icans and to the German Americans and to several 
other varieties of Americans, he must take the 
fence between those who believe in a League of 
Nations and those who hate a League of Nations, 
he must please capital and at the same time not 
alienate labor. 

Mr. Harding gave a glimpse of his difficulties 
when he said during the campaign, "I could make 
better speeches than these, but I have to be so 
careful." The greatest common divisor of all the 
minorities that go to making a winning national 
combination must be neutral, he must be colorless, 
he must not know that his soul is his own. The 
greatest common divisor of all the elements in 
the nation's political consciousness today is in- 
evitably a Mr. Harding. We shall probably have 

145 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

a whole series of Mr. Hardings in the White 
House. 

And when this greatest common divisor of all the 
classes and all the interests, this neutral, colorless 
person to whom no one can find any objection, 
enters the White House does he represent Labor? 
So little that he will not have a labor man in his 
Cabinet. Does he represent Capital? By instinct, 
by party training, by preference, yes, but capital is 
so divided that it is hard to represent, and the 
President, like the candidate, "has to be so care- 
ful." Does he represent the farmers? He says so, 
but the farmers choose to be represented elsewhere, 
on the hill, where they can find agents whose alle- 
giance is not so divided. 

And carefulness does not end upon election. 
Once a candidate always a candidate. The entire 
first term of a president is his second candidacy. 
His second term, if he wins one, is the candidacy of 
his successor, in whose election he is vitally inter- 
ested ; for the continuance of his party in power is 
the measure of public approval of himself. A 
president who is the greatest common divisor of 
groups and interests "must always be so careful" 
that he can never be a Roosevelt or a Wilson. 

Recapitulating the experiences of other peoples 
with political institutions, we have quickly, since 
our discovery of one man rule, run upon the period 
of little kings. The Carolingians have followed 
close upon the heels of the great Carl. The institu- 

146 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

tion which in the first decade of the twentieth cen- 
tury was a wonderful example of our capacity to 
adopt the rigors of a written constitution to our 
ends, of the practical genius of the American people, 
in the third decade of the twentieth centvuy is 
already dead. 

The monarch with power, not the mere survival 
who satisfies the instinct for the picttuesque, for the 
play of the emotions in politics, is suited to an 
imdiiferentiated people pursuing a single simple 
end ; one end, one man, many ends, many men is the 
rule. The greatest common divisor of such masses 
of men as inhabit this continent, so variously 
sprung, so variously seeking their place in the sun, 
is something that has to be so careful as to become 
a n-ullity. 

There is no reason why our presidents should not 
become like all single heads of modem civilized 
peoples, largely ornamental, largely links with the 
past, symbols to stir our inherited feelings as we 
watch their gracious progress through the movies. 
Mr. Harding is headed that way and if that Provi- 
dence which watches over American destinies 
vouchsafes him to us for eight years instead of only 
four, the Presidency under him will make progress 
toward a place alongside monarchy imder King 
George. 

Already, in the habit of blaming every failure and 
disappointment upon Congress, we see signs of the 
growth of the happy belief that the King can do 

147 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

no wrong. When the King does nothing he can do 
no wrong. 

There is no reason why we should not repeat the 
experiences of peoples who have gone further upon 
the road of social differentiation than we have 
and develop like them parliamentary government. 
By this I do not mean to echo the nonsense that 
has been written about having the Cabinet officers 
sit in Congress. 

What is more likely to come is a new shift in the 
balance, a new manifestation of our genius for the 
practical, which no written constitution can re- 
strain, which will place the initiative in the legisla- 
tive branch, whereas I have said, under Mr. 
Harding it is already passing, and which will make 
Congress rather than the President the dominant 
factor in our political life. 

This process is already taking place. 

When President Harding asked the advice of the 
Senate whether he should revive an old treaty with 
Germany suspended by the war, pointing proudly 
to the tenderness he was showing the partner of his 
political joys, he conceded an authority in the 
legislative branch which neither the Constitution 
nor our traditions had placed there. He took a 
step toward recognizing the prospective dominance 
of Congress. It was one of many. 

It is a long distance, as political institutions are 
measured, from President Wilson's telling the 
Senate that it must bow to his will even in dotting 

148 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

the i's and crossing the t's of the Versailles Treaty, 
to Mr. Harding's asking the Senate what was its 
will regarding the old German treaty. Foreign 
relations are precisely the field where the executive 
power seems by the Constitution to have been 
most clearly established, yet it is just here that the 
legislative branch has made its most remarkable 
advance toward a dominating position; perhaps 
because this topic gained a temporary importance 
from the war and it was naturally in the most 
significant area that the conflict between the two 
branches of the government had to break out. 

When President Harding introduced the treaties 
and pacts resulting from the Washington Confer- 
ence into the Senate, he said that he had been a 
Senator and knew the Senate views, and that all 
the agreements he was offering for ratification 
had been negotiated with scrupulous regard to the 
Senate's will. And he pleaded with the Senate not 
to disavow the Executive and impair its standing in 
the conduct of foreign relations. 

No more complete avowal could be made of the 
dominant position which the Senate has come to 
occupy in the diplomatic affairs of the country. 

In the field where he was supposed legally to 
have the initiative the President became expressly 
the agent of the Senate. The Senate laid out the 
limits of policy and the Executive scrupulously, so 
he said, observed those limits. 

This speech of Mr. Harding's, like his consulting 

149 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

the Senate in advance upon the reviving of the 
German treaty, is one of the significant evidences 
of the shift of power that is taking place, away from 
the Executive toward the Legislative. It did not 
attract the attention it deserved because our minds 
are still full of the past when the Presidency was a 
great office imder Wilson and Roosevelt. We read 
of Mr. Harding's going to the hill to tell Congress 
what it must do, and we ignore the fact that he 
always does so when Congress sends for him, acting 
as their agent. 

The King still makes his speech to Parliament, 
though the speech is written by the ministers. 
They are his ministers, though Parliament selects 
them. The power of the King is a convenient fic- 
tion. The power of the President will always 
remain a convenient fiction, even if it should 
come to have no more substance than that of the 
King. 

In truth it has been the Senate not the Executive 
that has been determining our foreign policy in its 
broader outlines for more than two years. The 
Secretary of State works out the details. But the 
Senate says "thus far shalt thou go and no farther." 
And when the Secretary of State has gone farther, 
as in the case of the peace treaty with Germany, 
the Senate has amended his work. So Senator 
Penrose did not exaggerate, when he said apropos 
of Mr. Hughes's appointment, "It makes no differ- 
ence who is Secretary of State, the Senate will make 

150 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

the foreign policy." The President has only re- 
cently declared that it has done so. 

So gradual has been the extension of the Senate's 
prerogative that few realize how far it has gone. 
So low had the Senate stink in public estimation 
during the war that it did not occur to President 
Wilson that he might not safely ignore it in making 
peace. He appointed no Senators to the delegation 
which went to Paris. He did not consult the Sen- 
ate during the negotiations nor did he ever take 
pains to keep the Senate informed. He proceeded 
on the theory that he might sign treaties with 
perfect confidence that the Senate would accept 
them unquestioningly. And so impressed was the 
country at the time with the power of the Presi- 
dency that Mr. Wilson's tacit assimiption of dicta- 
torial power over Congress was generally taken as 
a matter of course. 

All this was changed under Mr. Wilson's succes- 
sor. One half of Mr. Harding's delegation to the 
Washington Conference was made up of Senators. 
At every step of the negotiation the Senate's 
susceptibilities were borne in mind. No commit- 
ment was entered into which would exceed the 
limits set by the Senate to the involvement of this 
country abroad. Almost daily Mr. President 
consulted with Senators and explained to them 
what the American Commission was doing. Prac- 
tically the Executive became the agent of the Sen- 
ate in foreign relations and in the end he told the 

151 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Senate what a good and faithful servant he had 
been and how scruptilously he had respected its 
will. 

It was only superficially that Secretary Hughes 
was the outstanding figure of the Conference. The 
really outstanding figiire was the Senate. Mr. 
Hughes was not free. Mr. Harding was not free. 
The controlling factor was the Senate. The treaties 
had to be acceptable to the Senate, whose views 
were known in advance. No theory of party au- 
thority, of executive domination, would save them 
if they contravened the Senatorial policy disclosed 
in the Versailles Treaty debate and insisted upon 
anew to Mr. Hughes's grievous disappointment 
when the reservation was attached to the separate 
peace with Germany. When it was realized that 
Senate opposition to the Four Power Pact had been 
courted through the inadvertent guaranty of the 
home islands of Japan, the agreement was hastily 
modified to meet the Senate's views. President 
and Secretary of State behaved at this juncture 
like a couple of clerks caught by their employer in a 
capital error. 

And even Mr. Hughes's prominence was half 
accidental. The Senate is strong in position but 
weak in men. Mr. Hughes is vastly Mr. Lodge's 
superior in mind, in character, and in personality. 
Suppose the situation reversed, suppose the Senate 
rich in leadership, suppose it were Mr. Aldrich 
instead of Mr. Lodge who sat with Mr. Hughes in 

152 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

the Commission, then the Senate which had made 
the foreign poHcy in its broad outHnes would itself 
have filled in the details, and a Senator instead of 
the Secretary of State would have been the chief 
figure of the American delegation. 

Where did Mr. Harding's plan of settling inter- 
national affairs by conferences originate? You will 
find it in a document which Senator Knox brought 
out to Marion, Ohio, in January, 1921. Reports 
had come to Washington that Mr. Harding's 
Association of Nations, which was being discussed 
with the best minds was only Mr. Wilson's league 
re-cast. The leaders of the Senate met and agreed 
on a policy. Mr. Knox took it to the President 
elect. Instead of a formally organized association 
there was to be nothing more than international 
conferences and the appointment of international 
commissions as the occasion for them arose. Mr. 
Harding's policy is the Senate's policy. 

The Senate's victory has been complete. The 
United States did not ratify the Versailles Treaty. 
It did not enter the League of Nations. It did 
make a separate treaty of peace with Germany. 
It did not appoint a member of the Reparations 
Commission — the Senate's reservation to Mr. 
Hughes's treaty keeping that question in the con- 
trol of Congress. 

Senatorial control of foreign relations seems now 
to be firmly established. No future president, 
after Mr. Wilson's experiences with the Versailles 

153 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Treaty and Mr. Harding's with the Four Power 
Pact, will negotiate important foreign engagements 
without informing himself fully of the Senate's 
will. And the principle has been established that 
the Senate shall be directly represented on Amer- 
ican delegations to world conferences. 

I recall this history of the recent conflict between 
the Executive and the Senate over foreign relations 
to show how completely in this important field the 
theory of presidential dominance has broken down 
and been replaced by the practice of senatorial 
dominance. No amendment to the constitution 
has taken place. The President still acts "with the 
advice and consent of the Senate." Only now he 
takes the advice first so as to be sure of the consent 
afterward, instead of acting first and obtaining the 
advice and consent afterward. 

The Senate has been aided in this conflict with 
the Executive by the constitutional requirement of 
a two-thirds majority for the ratification of a 
treaty. If a majority would suffice, a President, 
by invoking the claims of party, by organizing pub- 
lic opinion, by judiciously using patronage might 
put his agreements with foreign nations through. 
But a two-thirds vote is not to be obtained by these 
methods ; the only practicable means is to accept the 
Senate's views of foreign policy and conform to it. 

As soon as foreign relations became sufficiently 
important to fight over the conflict was inevitable 
and the victory of the Senate certain. 

154 



GREATEST COMMON DIVISOR 

The conflict between the two branches of the 
Government will not stop with this victory of the 
Senate. It has always been present and probably 
always will be. The importance of the domestic 
problems that the war left will cause Congress to 
insist upon a free hand to make domestic policies. 
In the past Congress busied itself about little 
except the distribution of moneys for public build- 
ings and river and harbor improvement. The 
handling of these funds the legislative branch kept 
out of executive control. 

Now public buildings and improvements have 
become relatively unimportant. But the deepest 
economic interests of constituents are involved. 
Formerly taxes were small and lightly regarded. 
Today their incidence is the subject of a sharp 
dispute between classes and industries. 

Furthermore the use of government credit for 
certain economic ends, such as those favored by the 
farmers, will cause a clash between sections, groups, 
industries, and strata of society. Policies of large 
importance will have to be adopted about which 
there will be a vast difference of opinion. The 
divergent interests cannot be represented in the 
White House, for the Presidency embodies the 
compromise of all the interests. They will have to 
find their voice in Congress. When they find their 
voice the great policies will be made. And where 
the great policies will be made there the power 
will be. 

155 



CHAPTER IX 

CONGRESS AT LAST WITH SOMETHING TO DO HAS 
NO ONE TO DO IT 

When Lazarus was raised from the dead it took 
him a long time to find out that he was again aHve. 
His legs were stiff from being so long extended. 
His arms were cramped from being decently ar- 
ranged across his breast. The circulation starting 
in his members produced disagreeable sensations 
which recalled his mortal illness and the pains of 
dissolution. The last thing that this discomfort 
suggested was life. 

Even thus it is with Congress, it has been so long 
dead that it is hard for it to realize that it has once 
again come to life. It suffers from various un- 
pleasant sensations in its members, from blocs, 
from lack of leadership, from indifference to party, 
from factionalism, from individualism, from in- 
capacity to do business. They are all vaguely 
reminiscent of the pains of dissolution. On the 
dissolution theory they are decent and explicable, 
for death is always decent and explicable. 

As signs of life they are scandalous, and every- 

156 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

body is scandalized over them for fear that a vital 
Congress will be something new to reckon with. 

If Congress does realize that it has waked from 
the dead, who will be worse scandalized than the 
senile persons whom the newspapers respectfully 
call its "leaders"? What more threatening spec- 
tacle for second childhood is there than first child- 
hood? 

Suppose Congress were again a lusty and vigor- 
ous creature with the blood of youth in its veins, 
how long would Henry Cabot Lodge, aged seventy- 
two, remain leader of the Senate? Lodge, the iras- 
cible old man, with worn nerves, who claps his 
hands for the Senate pages as if they were not of the 
same flesh and blood with himself, and who would, 
if he could follow his instincts, clap his hands in the 
same way to summon the majority Senators, the 
recluse who is kept alive by old servants who under- 
stand and anticipate every whim, to enjoy greed- 
ily the petty distinctions that have come to him 
late because the Senate itself was more than half 
dead? 

And who would be worse scandalized than the 
ancient committee chairman, some with one foot 
in the grave? At one time in the first year of Mr. 
Harding's administration the important chairman- 
ships in the Senate were disposed thus : Finance, the 
most powerful committee. Senator Penrose, a dy- 
ing man; Foreign Relations, Senator Lodge, 72; 
Interstate Commerce, Senator Cummins, "^2^ and 

157 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

broken with illness; Judiciary, Senator Nelson, 
79 and living back in the Civil War in which 
he served as a private; Immigration, Senator 
Colt, 76. 

Suppose Congress should come to life and repre- 
sent the real interests of the various sections, 
classes, and, let us say, kinds of property and 
business in this country — ^how long would the 
Senate remain such a pleasant place to die in? 

When these old gentlemen made their successful 
fight upon President Wilson they signed their own 
death warrants, and began putting an end to the 
system that made their tenure possible. Only a 
Congress which had long been a subject of public 
contempt could have fallen into and could have 
remained in their hands. Granted that Congress 
is negligible, it makes no difference who sits in 
it or how decrepit its leadership. 

But shift power once more to the legislative, and 
the various conflicting interests throughout the 
country will grasp for the offices now in enfeebled 
hands. And by taking predominance in foreign 
relations away from the Executive and transferring 
it to themselves, the elderly and infirm "leaders," 
who have been tolerated out of half contempt, have 
started the avalanche of authority in their direction. 
It will sweep them off their unsteady feet. 

Let us examine what they have done. When 
they opposed Mr. Wilson on the Versailles Treaty 
they established the power of the Senate to mark 

158 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

out broadly the foreign policy of the United States, 
a dangerous enough beginning for persons who 
were merely tolerated because Congress was nearly 
negligible and it was a matter of little difference to 
the public who its managers were. But when they 
altered Mr. Harding's treaties they also denied the 
authority of the Executive as the head of his party 
to align them in support of his program. 

Party authority vested in the Executive thus 
impaired, it was not long before the representatives 
of agricultural states also denied it, and began to 
take their orders from the Farm Bureau Federa- 
tion instead of from the White House. Then the 
House leaders in open defiance of the "head of 
the party" prepared and reported a soldiers* 
bonus bill which contravened the express purposes 
of the Executive regarding this legislation. Here 
we have the organization joining with the farm 
bloc in declaring the legislature to be its own master. 

But on what do the octogenarian feet of Mr. 
Lodge and Mr. Cummins, and Mr. Colt and Mr. 
Nelson, and the others, rest except upon party 
authority? Not upon representing any real or 
vital principle in the national life. Not upon any 
force of intelligence or personality. 

They move in a region of fictions. They repre- 
sent the Republican party, when there is no Re- 
publican party, no union on principles, no stable 
body of voters, no discipline, no clear social end to 
be served. 

159 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

When votes for legislation must be had, Senator 
James Watson circulates about among the faith- 
less pleading in the name of party loyalty — as well 
talk of fealty to Jupiter in the capitol of the Popes ! 

In extremities the President, as "head of his 
party," is brought on the scene, — for all the world 
like the practice of a certain cult which long after 
its founder was dead used to dress up a lay figure 
to resemble him and drive it about the market- 
place, to reassure the faithful and confirm the influ- 
ence of the priests. Mr. Harding is alive enough, 
but the "head of his party" is dead and a mere 
fiction of priests like "Jim" Watson. 

Power has passed or is passing from the Execu- 
tive and has found no one in Congress to receive it. 
The arrival of power causes as much consternation 
on the hill as the outbreak of war does among the 
incompetent swivel chair bureaucrats of an army in 
a nation that has been long at peace. 

Power is passing to Congress because Congress 
says who shall pay the taxes and who may use the 
public credit. Where there was one interest a 
generation ago, there are many interests today, 
each trying to place the biu'den of taxation upon 
others and reaching for the credit itself. Taxation 
and credit are the big stakes today and Congress 
has them in its atrophied grasp. 

The question what is the matter with Congress 
has received more answers than any other question 
asked about American institutions. For almost a 

1 60 




SENATOR JAMES E. WATSON OF INDIANA 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

generation the national legislature has been re- 
garded as the one great failure in self government. 
For years it has been the home of small men con- 
cerned with petty things which it approached in a 
petty spirit, incompetent, wasteful, and hypocriti- 
cal, a trial to the Executive, almost a plague to the 
country. It has shared with state legislatures and 
municipal boards of aldermen the impatience of 
the people. In spite of searchings of the public 
conscience it has gone from bad to worse till it is 
at its lowest point today, in personnel, in organiza- 
tion, in capacity to transact business. 

What has brought Congress to this state has 
been the unimportance of its work, "doing such 
little things," as Mr. Root said after his six years 
in the Senate. Natural economy prevents the 
sending of a man on a boy's errand even if the man 
would go. 

The great power which legislatures have, that 
over the public purse, has not been of enough im- 
portance to make Congress a great legislature. 
Taxes were light and before the war fell so in- 
directly that the public gave them little attention. 
The control of the budget virtually passed out of 
the hands of Congress, for executive departments 
habitually exceeded their appropriations and Con- 
gress always made up the deficiencies. There was 
no tax upon incomes. Taxpayers were indifferent. 
A few hundred millions more or less was of no 
account. 

" i6i 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Dispensations to business in the shape of pro- 
tective duties upon imports, a form of taxation 
which once made Congress a dominant factor in 
national Hfe, had become steadily less important 
as American industry grew strong enough to hold 
its own market against competition and to com- 
pete itself in other markets. With the subsidence 
of the tariff as an issue Congress lost its last power 
to impose taxes in which the country was deeply 
interested. Where the control of the public purse 
and taxes are unimportant, legislatures are weak, 
imless executive authority is vested in a Cabinet 
formed from among their members. 

With the enfeeblement of Congress through the 
growing unimportance of the taxing power, its 
great function, came the tendency to magnify the 
Executive. Power has to go somewhere, and it 
went down Pennsylvania Avenue. And this move- 
ment coincided with the development of centraliza- 
tion. Congress, which was full of the spirit of local- 
ism, was not a perfect instrument of centralization. 
The Executive was. 

To elevate the President it was necessary to 
depress Congress. It became the fashion to speak 
sneeringly of the Legislative branch, to sympathize 
with presidents who "had Congress on their hands, 
to write of "the shame of the Senate," and when 
any issue existed between the two parts of the 
government to throw the force of public opinion 
on the side of the executive. The press printed 

162 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

endless criticism of the Senate and the House. 
Theories of government were invented to reduce 
Congress to a subordinate place. 

Meanwhile Congress, having regard for the 
character of its membership, was agreed that in- 
competence should suffer no disabilities. All that 
was required for political preferment within it was 
political longevity. 

The seniority rule, by which committee chair- 
manships went not to ability but to long service, 
favored mediocrity and second childhood. Even 
more, incompetence banded together jealously to 
protect itself against competence and shunted it 
into minor assignments. While the public was 
regarding Congress with contempt Congress was 
well satisfied to make itself contemptible. 

Suppose we had developed a capacity for breed- 
ing statesmen in this country, which we have not, 
would any man of first-class talents seek a public 
career in such an institution as I have described? 
In the first place, the people were visiting Congress 
with indifference, or v/orse than indifference, and 
ambition will not serve under indifference. In the 
next place that great power which makes legisla- 
tures dominant, the power to tax and to distribute 
the fruits of taxation, had become temporarily 
unimportant; and again, Congress itself was or- 
ganized for self-protection against brains and 
character. 

Senator Root quit the Senate in disgust. Sena- 

163 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

tor Kenyon has just followed his example in even 
deeper disgust. A Tammany Congressman after 
one term said, "They tie horses to Congressmen 
in Washington." 

Congress is upon the whole a faithful reflection 
of the American political consciousness. Democ- 
racy is a relatively new thing. It has not taken 
hold of the minds and hearts of men. Shadowy and 
half-unconscious faiths dispute its place. De Gour- 
mont writing of the persistence of Paganism in 
Catholicism, says that no religion ever dies but 
lives on in its successor. So no government ever 
dies but lives on in its successor. Why take the 
trouble to govern yourselves when your vital inter- 
ests are so well directed by the higher governments, 
of Progress, of economic Forces, of heroes and cap- 
tains of industry who ruled by a sort of divine 
right? The less you try to muddle through by 
means of poor human instruments in this well- 
ordered world the better. 

For the limited tasks of self-government, why 
should special talents be required? We are still 
near enough the pioneer age to adhere to pioneer 
conceptions. Roosevelt, unfortunately, is the 
national ideal. 

We look hopefully for great amateurs like him 
among insurance agents, building contractors, 
lawyers, country editors, bankers, retiring, with 
modest fortunes made, into public life. We put 
the jack of all trades everywhere. Into the Presi* 

164 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

dency — and I don't know why we should not in 
that office, for it is a waste of material and a mis- 
direction of effort in self-government to throw away 
a first-class public man on a four-year job. Into 
the Senate and the House, into the Cabinet, where 
a lawyer without previous experience of interna- 
tional affairs conducts our foreign relations in the 
most difficult period of the world's history, match- 
ing the power of his coimtry against the wits of 
other countries' practiced representatives, and thus 
obtaining a certain forbearance of their extreme 
skill. 

Into the diplomatic posts, where an editor, 
Colonel Harvey, noted only for his audacity, holds 
the most important ambassadorship. Those who 
have seen the Colonel at meetings of the Supreme 
Council tell the amazing story that he was a silent 
and uneasy figure in the conferences of Mr. Lloyd 
George and Mr. Briand, perhaps because he is only 
an observer, perhaps also because he was in the 
company of practiced statesmen and diplomats. 

However, our system has its compensations. 
The picture of the robustious Colonel imeasy in 
Zion is one of them. 

In another great diplomatic post is Mr. Richard 
Washburn Child, a quantity producer of fiction, 
or sort of literary Henry Ford. In another, Paris, 
the second most important in the world, Mr. My- 
ron Herrick, a retired business man. Senator 
Foraker said of him, at a critical moment of his 

1^5 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

public career, ''De mortuis nil.'' " Don't you wish 
to finish that quotation, 'nisi bonum,'" asked the 
reporter who was seeking a statement. ' ' No, ' ' said 
the Senator sharply; "De mortuis nil." Of the 
ambassador to France nil, except that he comes 
from Ohio. 

But when we, given all these causes for the weak- 
ness of Congress, the frail hold which the idea of 
self-government has upon the popular mind, the 
imimportance of the taxing power, the tendency to 
concentrate on the executive at the expense of the 
legislative, the obstacles to ability which medioc- 
rity has erected in Congress, we have not explained 
the present extraordinary confusion and demoral- 
ization in the legislative branch. Most of these 
causes have been operating for some time, yet 
Congress has been able to function. Only since 
Mr. Harding became President has the breakdown 
of Congress been marked. 

If you ask observers in Washington why the last 
Congress failed more completely than any of its 
predecessors, with one voice they reply: "Lack of 
leadership." Everybody cackles of leadership as if 
lack of leadership were a cause and not a symptom. 
What is it that makes a leader and followers unless 
it is a common purpose? 

The weakness of Mr. Harding, Mr. Lodge, 
Speaker Gillett, Mr. Mondell lies partly in them- 
selves, but it is made more apparent by the difficul- 
ties that confront them. It traces back to the 

166 




REPRESENTATIVE FREDERICK H. GILLETT OF MASSACHUSETTS 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

uncertainties in the national mind. Who could 
lead representatives of taxpayers staggering under 
the costs of the war and representatives of soldiers 
striving to lay an added burden on the taxpayers? 
Who could lead representatives of farmers who 
demand that a large share of the credit available 
in this country be mobilized by the government 
for the subvention of agriculture and representa- 
tives of commerce and manufacture who wish to 
keep the government from competing with them 
for the stock of credit? Or labor which insists that 
the way to improve business is by stimulating de- 
mand at home through liberal wages, increasing 
consumption; and the other classes which insist 
that the way to restore business is by making in- 
creased consimiption possible to them through 
lower prices only to be accomplished through lower 
wages? The conflict runs across party lines. The 
old rallying cries fall on deaf ears. 

The Republican party was based on the common 
belief that government favors delivered at the top 
percolated down, by a kind of gravity that oper- 
ated with rough justice, to all levels of society, 
like water from a reservoir on a hill reaching all 
the homes of a city. When you called for loyalty 
to that you called for loyalty to everybody's 
stomach, expressed in the half -forgotten phrase: 
"The full dinner pail." 

Now, the various elements of society are doubt- 
ful of what may reach them by the force of gravity 

167 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

from the top. Each insists that government favor 
shall enter at its level and be diffused from that 
center. Would you make the nation happy and 
rich, give the soldiers a five-billion-dollar bonus and 
start them buying? Give the farmers a several- 
billion-dollar guarantee of their staples and start 
prosperity on the farm. Give labor high wages and 
start prosperity there by stimulating consumption. 
Give the consumer lower prices by cutting wages 
and start prosperity there. Shift the burden of 
taxation somewhat from wealth and start prosperity 
once more in the good old way by favors at the top. 

One might compare the breakup that has oc- 
curred in this country to the breakup that took 
place in Russia after the first revolution, the peace- 
ful and ineffective revolution of 1905. All parties 
in Russia united against absolutism. A measure of 
representative government being established and 
the main object of the revolution being achieved, 
all parties fell to quarrelling among themselves as 
to which should profit most by the new institutions. 

Under Mr. Roosevelt and his successors a 
mild revolution was accomplished. People turned 
against economic absolutism. They had begun to 
question the unregulated descent of favors from 
the top. They doubted the force of gravity that 
used to fill dinner pails. They demanded some 
representation in the process of filling dinner pails. 
They set up a government at Washington to con- 
trol credit and transportation. 

168 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

And now they have fallen apart over who shall 
pay the taxes, who shall have use of the credit, who 
shall profit by lowered freight rates, rebates in 
principle, special favors in transportation, under a 
new name. 

When men today deplore the lack of leadership 
they are comparing Mr. Harding with Mr. Roose- 
velt and Mr. Wilson, and Mr. Lodge and Mr. 
Mondell with Senator Hanna and Senator Aldrich. 
Today's chiefs of state are of smaller stature. Mr. 
Harding has been a drifter all his life; he has not 
the native force of Mr. Roosevelt, the sheer vital- 
ity which gloried in overcoming obstacles. He has 
not the will of A^r. Wilson. The petulant Lodge is 
not the same order of being as the brutal, thick- 
necked Hanna, or the more finished but still robust 
Aldrich. 

But beyond this personal superiority which the 
leaders of the past had, they enjoyed the advantage 
of standing upon sure ground. Mr. Hanna be- 
longed to that fortunate generation which never 
doubted, whether it was in religion or morals or 
politics. He may not have put it so to himself, 
but behind everything that he did lay the tacit 
assumption that the business system was divinely 
ordained. The hand of Providence was conspicu- 
ous everywhere in America's rise, but nowhere 
more than in the rapid turning, unprecedented in 
the world's history, of minerals and forests into a 
civilization. 

169 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

In times of daily miracles it is easy to believe. 
Mr. Hanna believed, the public believed, Congress 
believed. Mr. Hanna spoke for this divinely 
ordained system which was developing an imde- 
veloped continent as one had never been in the 
memory of man, making us all richer, with a cer- 
tain rough justice, according to our deserts. 

He himself was a pioneer. He himself had 
created wealth. He knew the creators of wealth. 
He delivered the commandments handed down to 
him on the mountain. With God so much on his 
side a much lesser man than Hanna would have 
been a great leader. God isn't on the side of Mr. 
Lodge. That is the difference. 

Mr. Aldrich represented a less pure faith. What 
had been a primitive religion had become an es- 
tablished church. He had behind him a power of 
organization in business and Congress that Hanna 
had not. The public may have been less faithful; 
still the religion he represented was the official 
religion. 

Like Hanna, he was rich and a creator of wealth ; 
in addition he was connected by marriage with the 
richest family in the United States. He was the 
spokesman of business, and even if faith was 
decaying no one seriously questioned the sacred 
character of business as the instrument of Provi- 
dence for making America great, rich, and free. 

The chief aim was the creation of wealth. No 
one could doubt that the business organization 

170 



SOMETHING TO DO— NO ONE TO DO IT 

was accomplishing it with unparalleled success. 
Perhaps the heads of the business organization kept 
a little too much of the newly created wealth to 
themselves, but at least everyone shared in it and 
it was wise to let well enough alone. Where there 
is such substantial unity as existed at that time, no 
great personal qualities are required for leadership. 

And Mr. Aldrich was not endowed with great 
personal qualities. He has been gone from Wash- 
ington only a dozen years, and yet no tradition of 
him survives except that he managed the Senate 
machine efficiently. In type he was the business 
executive. He represented more fully than anyone 
else in the Senate the one great interest of the 
country. He stood for a reality, and it gave him 
tremendous power. 

His mind was one of ordinary range. He traded 
in tariff schedules and erected majorities upon the 
dispensing of favors. He bestowed public buildings 
and river improvements in return for votes. Lead- 
ers have not now these things to give or have them 
in insufficient quantities and on too unimportant 
a scale. 

No great piece of constructive legislation serves 
to recall him. Primarily a man of business, he 
nevertheless attached his name to the grotesque 
Aldrich -Vreeland currency act. The work of the 
monetary commission of which he was the head, 
and which led to the present Federal Reserve Law, 
was the work of college professors and economists. 

171 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Natually a better leader than Mr. Lodge be- 
cause he met men more easily upon a common 
ground and had more vitality than the Massa- 
chusetts Senator has, he was no better leader than 
any one of half a dozen present Senators would be 
if the aim of business were accepted today by 
the cotmtry as the great social aim, as it was in his 
day, and if any one of the six now spoke for business 
in the Senate as in his time he did. 

Give Mr. Brandegee or Mr. Lenroot or Mr. 
Wadsworth a people accepting that distribution 
which worked out from extending to the heads of 
the business organization every possible favor and 
immimity, as the distribution best serving the 
interests of all, and add imto him plenty of public 
buildings and river improvements, and he could 
lead as well as Mr. Aldrich. 



172 



CHAPTER X 

INTERLUDE. INTRODUCING A FEW MEMBERS OF THE 
UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE AND SOME OTHERS 

There is a saying that in American families 
there is only three or four generations from riches 
to shirt sleeves. Mr. Hanna is the first generation, 
Mr. Aldrich is the second generation. In Mr. 
Penrose and Mr. Lodge you reach what is a com- 
mon phase of American family history, the ec- 
centric generation. And in Senator Jim Watson 
and Senator Charles Curtis, who are just coming 
on the scene as "leaders," you reach once more 
political shirt sleeves. 

The American family dissipating its patrimony, 
produces invariably the son who is half contemptu- 
ous of the old house that founded his fortunes, who 
is half highbrow, who perhaps writes books as well 
as keeping them, or it may be bolts to the other 
side altogether. 

So the Hanna-Aldrich stock produced Henry 
Cabot Lodge, a sort of political James Hazen Hyde, 
who stayed at home and satisfied his longing for 
abroad by serving on the Senate Foreign Relations 

173 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Committee. But perhaps it would be fairer to Mr. 
Lodge to say of him what a witty friend of mine 
did, * ' Lodge is what Henry James would have been 
if Henry James had remained in America and gone 
into politics." Or he is what Henry Adams might 
have been if Henry Adams had been less honest in 
his contempt for democracy. 

The last leaf of that New England tree whose 
fruit was an expatriate literature and expatriate 
lives, the limit of Mr. Lodge's expatriation was 
an interest in foreign affairs when redder-blooded 
Americans were happily ignorant of them. If 
business had been choosing spokesmen at Washing- 
ton it would no more have picked out Mr. Lodge 
than it would have picked out James Hazen Hyde 
or Henry James. Mr. Lodge's leadership was a 
sign of decay. 

But some will say business at this time had 
Senator Penrose as its spokesman. I doubt it. 
Senator Penrose was that other son of the family in 
whose blood runs all the ancestral energies without 
the ancestral restraint. 

By the time he achieved prominence business in 
politics was no longer quite respectable. People 
said, creating the Penrose legend, "Why, Penrose 
would stop at nothing. He'd even represent the 
selfish interests here in Washington." Therefore 
it was considered that he must represent them. 
And he did to an extent, speaking for Henry C. 
Frick and some others of Pennsylvania, but he was 

174 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

in no adequate sense the successor of Aldrich and 
Hanna. 

Had business chosen a spokesman at Washington, 
he must have been respectable. Hanna was that 
most respectable of Americans, the highly success- 
ful man who has played for and won a great for- 
tune. Aldrich was that equally respectable Ameri- 
can, the conservative manager of the established 
corporation. 

There is a story that when Penrose became boss 
of Pennsylvania the Republican politicians of the 
State were anxious about the effect his personal 
reputation would have upon the voters. Finally 
they went to him, as the elders sometimes go 
to the yoimg parson, and said, "The organization 
thinks the people would like it better if you were 
married." "All right, boys, if you think so," 
Penrose replied; "let the organization pick the 
gal. ' ' The organization recoiled from this cynicism. 
But business is harder. Business, if it had really 
identified itself with Penrose, would have "picked 
the gal." 

No better evidence of the tenuity of his con- 
nection with business is required than his outbreak 
in 1920, "I won't have the international bankers 
write the platform and nominate the candidate at 
Chicago." 

Mr. Penrose enjoyed a * ' succes de scandale.' ' He 
was what the hypocrites in Washington secretly 
desired to be but lacked the courage to be. He 

175 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

lived up to the aristocratic tradition, at its worst; 
which everyone admires, especially at its worst. 
He did on a grand scale what anyone else would 
have been damned for doing on a lesser scale and 
was loved for being so splendidly shocking. 

He was the village sport, with the best blood 
of the village in his veins, and was the village 
delight, the man about whom all the best stories 
were whispered. He had the clear mind which 
comes from scorn of pretense. But all this is 
not greatness, nor is it leadership. The Repub- 
licans in the Senate before being led by Mr. Pen- 
rose would have insisted on "picking the gal." 
They like to see framed marriage certificates in 
the party household. 

The patrimony is gone and we reach shirt sleeves 
in Senator Charles Curtis and Senator James 
Watson, one of whom will succeed Mr. Lodge when 
he dies, retires, or is retired, and the other of whom 
will succeed Mr. Cummins as president pro tern 
when he similarly disposes of himself or is disposed 
of. 

Neither of them has tne stature or solidity of 
Hanna or Aldrich, and they will not have support- 
ing them unity in party or in national sentiment. 
Neither of them has the romantic quality of Mr. 
Penrose or Mr. Lodge. Neither of them will 
ever be a leader in any real sense of the word. 
Neither of them will have anything to lead. 

As frequently happens when you reach shirt 

176 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

sleeves by the downward route, you find the 
accumulative instinct reasserting itself on a petty 
scale. Look at the rather shabby clothes that 
Senator Curtis wears, in spite of his considerable 
wealth, and you are sure that you have to do with a 
hoarder. And that is what he is; a hoarder of 
political minutiae. 

Current report is that he is the best poker player 
in either house of Congress. You can imagine 
him sitting across the table watching the faces of 
his antagonists with a cold eye, which no tremor 
of a muscle, no faint coming or going of color, no 
betraying weakness escapes. 

That is his forte in politics, knowing all the little 
things about men which reveal their purposes or 
operate in unexpected ways as hidden motives. 

He has a perfect card catalogue of nearly all the 
voters of Kansas. It is kept up to date. It reports 
not merely names and addresses but personal 
details, the voter's point of view, what interests 
him, what influences may be brought to bear on 
him. Curtis is a hoarder, with an amazing capa- 
city for heaping up that sort of information. 

His mind is a card catalogue of the Senate, 
vastly more detailed than the card catalogue of 
Kansas. He watches the Senate as he watches the 
faces of his antagonist in a poker game. He knows 
the little unconsidered trifles which make men vote 
this way and that. And he is so objective about 
it all that he rarely deceives himself. If into this 
12 177 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

concern with the small motives which move men 
there crept a certain contempt of hiamanity he 
might mislead himself; he might be hateful, too; 
but his objectivity saves him ; he is as objective as a 
card catalogue and no more hateful. 

But you see how far short all this falls from 
leadership, or statesmanship, or greatness of any 
description. Usefulness is there certainly; card 
catalogues are above all useful, especially when 
there is variety and diversity to deal with, as 
there is coming to be in a Senate ruled by blocs and 
frequented by undisciplined individualism. 

If Curtis kept a journal he would hand down to 
posterity a most perfect picture of men and motives 
in Washington, — if, again, posterity should be in- 
terested in the fleeting and inconsiderable figures 
who fill the national capital "in this wicked and 
adulterous generation seeking for a sign" — I am 
quoting the Bible trained Secretary of State in one 
of his petulant moments. 

If he had the malice of Saint Simon, the journal 
would be diverting, but he is without malice. He 
has no cynical conception of men's weakness and 
smallness as something to play upon. He accepts 
Senators as they are, sympathetically. What 
makes them vote this way and that is the major 
consideration of politics. His records of the 
Kansas electorate are more important to him than 
principles, policies, or morals. The efficient elec- 
tion district Captain of the Senate, that is Curtis. 

178 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

A more likely successor to Lodge is ' ' Jim" Watson 
of Indiana. I attended a theatrical perfonnance 
in Washington recently. Nearby sat the Indiana 
Senator. His neighbor, whom I did not recognize, 
doubtless some politician from Indiana, sat with 
his arm about Watson's neck, before the curtain 
rose, potu-ing confidences into Watson's ear. 

Watson is given to public embraces. His arm 
falls naturally about an interlocutor's shoulders or, 
and this is important as showing that Jim is not 
merely patronizing, descending affectionately from 
the great heights of the Senatorship, Jim himself, as 
at the theatre, is the object of the embrace. But 
perhaps that is finer condescension. 

If the characteristic gestiu-e of Lodge is the 
imperious clapping of his hands for the Senate 
pages and the revealing trait of Curtis is extra- 
ordinary intuition about the cards in other hands 
around the lamp-lit table, the soul of Watson is in 
the embrace. His voice is a caress. He kisses 
things through. He never errs in personal re- 
lations, if you like to be embraced — and most men 
do, by greatness. 

In one of his less successful moments he rep- 
resented, at Washington the National Manu- 
facturers' Association, at that time a rather shady 
organization of lesser business men. If he had not 
been the orator that he is he would have been with 
that circumambulatory arm of his, an inevitable 
lobbyist. 

179 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

For Watson is an orator, of the old school, the 
Harding school. They employ the same loose style 
of speech, flabby as unused muscles, words that 
come into your head because you have often heard 
them on the sttmip and in the Senate, and read 
them in coimtry editorials, words that have long 
lost their precise meaning but evoke the old pictures 
in the minds of an emotional and unthinking 
electorate. At this art of emitting a long rumble 
of speech which is not addressed to the mind 
Watson has no equal. 

It is an American art and puzzling to foreigners. 
Vice-Admiral Kato, not the head of the Japanese 
delegation but the second Kato, had enough English 
to remark it. "Your President," he said, "is a 
charming man, but why does he put such funny 
things in his speeches? " 

In the mere mastery of this kind of English Mr. 
Harding may equal Watson, but as an orator the 
Indianian has what the President never had; the 
unctious quality in him which makes him embrace 
readily lets him pour out his soul freely. He has 
thunders in his voice, he tosses his head with its 
fuzzy hair magnificently, he has gusto. He has 
imagination. He is a big, lovable if not wholly 
admirable, boy playing at oratory, playing at 
statesmanship, playing above all at politics. Noth- 
ing is very real to him, not even money; he put 
all he had into an irrigation project and left it 
there. Just now he irrigates with the tears in his 

i8o 




SENATOR JOSEPH S. FR ELI NGH U YS EN OF NEW JERSEY 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

voice the arid places in the RepubHcan party where 
loyalty should grow. 

I present these characterizations of Senate 
leaders, past, present, and future, to indicate 
through them what the Senate itself is, and to 
suggest what conditions have given quite ordinary 
men power and how feeble leadership has become, 
with the country no longer agreed how best to 
promote the general good, and with Congress as it 
has been in recent years a relatively unimportant 
factor in the national government. 

Senator Piatt used to say of an habitual candi- 
date for nomination to the governorship of New 
York, Timothy L. Woodruff, ''Well, it may taper 
down to Tim. ' ' We have ' ' tapered down to Tim, ' ' 
— or rather to "Jim" — in the Senate because as a 
people we have been indifferent and unsiu-e, and 
because there has been little use for an3rthing but 
' ' Tims " or " Jims ' ' in Washington . Nature seems 
to abhor a waste in government. 

Those who ascribe all the troubles in Congress to 
lack of leadership, and go no further, blame the 
poverty of our legislative life upon the popular 
election of Senators and upon the choice of candi- 
dates at direct primaries. But the decay began 
before the system changed. We resorted to new 
methods of nomination and election because the old 
methods were giving us Lorimers and Addickses. 
Probably we gained nothing, but we lost little. 

Big business, so long as the taxing power, 

i8i 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

through the imposition of the tariff, was important 
to it, and so long as it was accepted as the one vital 
interest of the country, saw to it that it was 
effectively represented in Congress. It was then 
somebody's job to see that at least some solid men 
went to Washington. It has of late been nobody's 
job. There has been no real competition for seats 
in the national legislature. 

The Senate has tempted small business men who 
can not arise to the level of national attention 
through their control of industry, and small lawyers 
similarly restricted in their efforts for publicity. 
It is an easily attained national stage. 

It appeals to that snobbish instinct — of wives 
sometimes — which seeks social preferment not to 
be obtained in small home towns, or denied where 
family histories are too well known. 

It allures the politician, bringing opportunity to 
play the favorite game of dispensing patronage and 
delivering votes, with the added pomp of a title. 

It is the escape of the aristocrat, whose traditions 
leave him the choice between idleness and what is 
called "public service." 

It is the escape of the successful man who has 
foimd his success empty and tries to satisfy the 
unsatisfied cravings of his nature. Such men 
"retire" into it, as it was reported to President 
Harding's indignation that one of the Chicago 
banker candidates for the Secretaryship of the 
Treasxiry wished to retire into the Cabinet. Some 

182 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

enter it for one of these motives, more from a 
combination of them, but, generally, it is the 
promised land of the bored, some of whom find it 
only a mirage. 

A typical Senator is Mr. Frelinghuysen of New 
Jersey, one of the smaller business men being drawn 
into public life. Son of a country minister, he 
started as an insurance agent. Nature equipped 
him with unusual energy and aggressiveness and 
those two qualities brought success in writing insur- 
ance. Nothing in his early training inhibited his 
robust temperament. Ruddy and vigorous, he is 
not sicklied o'er with any pale cast whatever. 
Plainly he has a zest for life, that easily accessible 
American life where good mixers abound. 

Not a highbrow, he yet recognizes that literature 
has its place, on all four walls of a large room, and 
bought in sets. 

Having the American horror of loneliness, 
whether social or moral, you find him always going 
along with his party. When his set divides he 
balances between the two factions as long as 
possible and elects to go with the more nimierous. 
Simple, likable, honest, safe so long as majorities 
are safe, and that is the theory we are working on, 
he is the average man in everything but his 
aggressiveness and energy. 

No, he also rises above the average in possessing 
such a name as Frelinghuysen. You enter his 
library and you see a banner of the campaign of 

183 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Clay and Frelinghuysen. He will recite to you 
campaign songs of those unsuccessful candidates 
for President and Vice-President. Another 
Frelinghuysen was a Cabinet member. Another 
Frelinghuysen, of the wealthier branch of the 
family, has an assiu*ed social position. 

None of these famous Frelinghuysens is an 
ancestor. Each of them is a challenge. If he 
could have foimd an ancestor! If an insurance 
company were a high place from which to survey 
the world at one's feet! But, no! Ancestors, 
power, publicity, social prestige, all lie beyond 
the reach of small business success. 

In the Senate men, important men, come to you 
for favors ; it is so much better than going to them 
to write policies. From the Senator ship you 
condescend; there really is a world to which a 
Senator can condescend. Washington is a social 
melting pot. No one asks whether you are one of 
the Blanks. You are Senator Blank and that is 
enough. And if you are so fortunate, by yoiu- very 
averageness, to attach yourself to the average 
man whose fortune makes him President, and you 
become one of the Harding Senators, one of the 
intimates, you are lifted up: like Bottom, you are 
translated. You are the familiar of greatness. 

As a legislator you deal with policies, inter- 
national and domestic, in the realm of ideas — as 
when you sit in your library, four square with all 
the wisdom of the ages. 

184 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

If you have enough of the boy about you, Hke 
Frehnghuysen, you enjoy all this hugely. You 
have projected your ego beyond the limits of the 
insurance business. You look among the branches 
of the Frehnghuysen family tree without losing 
countenance. Who knows that there won't be 
another "and Frehnghuysen" ticket, this time a 
successful one? 

Not every senator has escaped so nearly from 
the failures which attend success as has Frehng- 
huysen. Nor is his escape complete. A sense of 
unreality haimts him. Aggressiveness in his case 
covers it, as it so often does a feeling of weakness. 
After he has blustered through some utterance, he 
will buttonhole you and ask, ' ' Did I make a damn 
fool of myself? Now, the point I was trying to 
make was, etc. Did I get it clear? Or did I seem 
like a damn fool? " 

Less agile minded than Senator Edge, he watches 
the motions of his New Jersey colleague as a fasci- 
nated bird watches those of a snake or a cat. 
Intellectually he is not at ease, even in the Senate. 

Another of the Harding set is Harry New of 
Indiana, one of the " Wa'al naow" school of states- 
men, in dress and speech the perfect county chair- 
man of the stage. The broad -brimmed black felt 
hat, winter and simimer, has withstood all the 
insidious attacks of fashion. The nasal voice has 
equally resisted all the temptations to conformity 
with the softer tones which are now everywhere 

185 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

heard. In politics one has to be regular, and New 
has the impulse to individuality, which with Borah 
and LaFollette manifests itself in political isolation. 
With New it manifests itself in hat and speech. 
New thus remains a person, not merely a clothes- 
horse which is recorded "aye" when Mr. Lodge 
votes "aye" and "no" when Mr. Lodge votes 
"no." But this is hardly fair. Mr. New has 
been irregular in other ways. He has not made 
money; he has lost it, a fortune in a stone quarry. 
He is indifferent to it. This marks him as a 
person. He would rather whip a stream for trout 
than go after dollars with a landing net. 

Whipping a stream for trout is the clue to Harry 
New. If you are a fisherman you impute all sorts 
of wiles to the fish. You match your wits against 
the sharp wits under the water, and your ego is 
fortified when, the day being dark and your hand 
being cunning, you land a mess from the stream. 
The world is a trout stream to New. The hat and 
the nasal accent are the good old flies that Isaak 
Walton recommended. 

There is the type of mind which sees craft where 
others see simplicity. We associate shrewdness 
with the kind of hat New wears and the kind of 
voice he has preserved against the seductions of 
politeness. It is one of our rural traditions. 
Suppose shrewdness that asks no more than 
conversation and a small mess of fish. It is 
delightful. As we listen to it arriving after the 

i86 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

most penetrating exposition at the same con- 
clusions which we have reached directly and 
stupidly, we are flattered. We realize that we, 
too, are shrewd, unconsciously so, as, wasn't it 
Moliere's bourgeois gentleman, who learned that he 
was unconsciously a gentleman, since he had been 
doing all his life some of the things that gentlemen 
did? 

A playboy of the western plains. New would be 
happier if his colleague, Jim Watson, did not also 
take himself seriously as a politician. "Jim," says 
New, "is an orator, a great orator, but he ought to 
let politics alone; as a politician he is, like all orators 
a child." 

New is no orator. A fair division would be for 
Watson to be the orator and New the politician. 
But no one is ready to admit that he is no politician. 
For New politics is craft ; for Watson it is embraces. 
At a dinner in Indiana, New contrived to have his 
rival for the senatorship, Beveridge, and the 
politically outlawed Mayor of Indianapolis, Lew 
Shank, not invited. Watson would have led them 
both in with an arm around the neck of each. 
That individualism which makes New preserve the 
hat and the accent makes him punish foes, or is it 
that the sense of being "close to Harding" robs 
him of discretion? 

In the board of aldermen of any large city you 
will find a dozen Calders, local builders or con- 
tractors, good fellows who have the gift of knowing 

187 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

everyone in their districts, who by doing Httle 
favors here and there get themselves elected to the 
municipal legislature; they see that every con- 
stituent gets his street sign and sidewalk 
encimibrance permits, interview the police in 
their behalf when necessary, and the bright young 
men who compose the traditional humor of the daily 
press refer to them gaily as "statesmen." 

The art of being a Senator like Calder is the art 
of never saying "no." He is worth mentioning 
because he has the bare essentials of senatorship, 
the habit of answering all letters that come to him, 
the practice of introducing by request all bills that 
anyone asks to have introduced, industry in seeking 
all jobs and favors that anyone comes to him 
desiring. 

He "goes to the mat" for everybody and every- 
thing. He shakes everybody's hand. He is a 
good news source to representatives of the local 
press and is paid for his services in publicity. New 
York is populous and sent many soldiers to the late 
war. Nevertheless, the mother or father of a 
soldier from that state who did not receive a 
personal letter from Calder must have eluded 
the post office. 

He votes enthusiastically for everything that 
everybody is for. He is unhappy when he has to 
take sides on sharply debated issues. Morality is 
a question of majorities. He finds safety in 
numbers. 




SENATOR HARRY S. NEW OF INDIANA 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

Nature was not kind to Calder; it left him with 
no power to throw a bluff. He is plainly what he 
is. He has neither words nor manner. His col- 
leagues look down on him a little. But most of 
them are after all only Calder plus, and plus, 
generally speaking, not so very much. He is the 
Senator reduced to the lowest terms. 

Calder is timid, more timid than Frelinghuysen 
with his eternal buttonholing you to ask what 
impression he has made, more timid than anyone 
except Kellogg of Minnesota. The latter is in a 
constant state of flutter. Little and wisplike 
physically he seems to blow about with every 
breeze of politics. He is so unsure that his nerves 
are always on edge, in danger of breaking. When 
he was balancing political consequences over nicely 
during the League of Nations discussion, Ex-Presi- 
dent Taft said to him impatiently: "The trouble 
with you, Frank, is that you have no guts." 
Kellogg straightened up all his inches — physically 
he is a white-haired and bent Will H. Hays — and 
replied, "I allow no man to say that to me." He 
fluttered out, and Mr. Taft being kind-hearted 
followed him to apologize. 

If you could analyze the uneasiness of Mr. 
Kellogg you would understand the fear which 
haunts the minds of all Senators. Mr. Kellogg 
comes to Washington after an enormously successful 
career at the bar. He is rich. He is respected. 
His place in society is secure. What would the 

189 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

loss of the senatorship mean to such a man? He 
ought to have all the confidence which is supposed 
to be in the man who rises in the world, all that 
which comes from an established position. Unlike 
most great lawyers who retire into the Senate, Mr. 
Kellogg does not merely interest himself in con- 
stitutional questions, like a child with molasses on 
its fingers playing with feathers. He is industrious. 
He interests himself in the Senate's business. He 
develops nice scruples which can not be brushed 
aside. He wears himself out over them. He hesi- 
tates. He trembles. The certainty with which 
his mind must have operated in the field of legal 
principles deserts him in the field of political 
expediency. Or perhaps it is that he sees both 
principles and expediency and can not choose 
between the two, 

Wadsworth of New York is an exception to the 
general run of Senators. He belongs by birth to 
the class which is traditionally free from hypocrisy. 
He is not boisterously contemptuous of the slavish- 
ness of Senators as Penrose was. He is quietly 
contemptuous. His voice has a note of well-bred 
impatience in it. He has not Penrose's pleasure in 
mere shocking, but he has the aristocratic hatred 
of moral ostentation. The kind of thing that is not 
done is the kind of thing that is not done. You 
don't do it and make no parade of your abstinence. 
Wadsworth does not open his home to all his New 
York colleagues in both houses just because it is 

190 




SENATOR JAMES W. WADSWORTH OF NEW YORK 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

politically expedient. His house is his own, and 
so is his conscience, which is not surrendered at the 
demands of woman suffrage or of the dries. He 
has courage. He has convictions. He is lonely. 
To be otherwise than lonely in the Senate you 
must be a Frelinghuysen, an Elkins, a Newberry, 
a New, a Watson, or a Hale. He will never be 
a leader. He has no more place in the Senate as 
it is than Lord Robert Cecil, a much larger 
man, has in the House of Commons as it is. 
Both belong to another day and generation. 
Neither is sure of anything but himself and each 
counts the world well lost. Both represent the 
aristocratic tradition. 

Industry makes Reed Smoot one of the most 
useful of the Senators. He has a passion for details. 
He reads all the bills. He makes himself a master 
of the Government's appropriations and expendi- 
tures. He exudes figiu'es from every pore. By 
temperament Mr. Smoot is unhappy, and he finds 
cause of dark foreboding in the mounting costs of 
government. His voice has a scolding note. His 
manner and appearance is that of a village elder. 
His heart is sore as he regards the political world 
about him, its wastefulness, its constimption of 
white paper, on leaves to print and on reports 
which no one reads. He is the aggrieved parent. 
"My children," he seems always to say, "you must 
mend your ways." He specializes in misplaced 
■commas. Nothing is too trivial for his all seeing 

191 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

eyes. In committee he talks much, twice as much 
as anyone else, about points which escape the 
attention of all his colleagues. Senators, wishing 
to get through no matter how, regard him as a pest. 
Only an unimaginative and uncreative mind can 
occupy itself as Smoot's does. He is a building 
inspector rather than a builder. With his fussi- 
ness, his minor prophetic voice, his holier-than-thou 
attitude toward waste, he can never be a leader of 
the Senate to which the idle apprentice, the good 
fellow, who dines out much in the Harding Senato- 
rial set, the small business man seeking a place 
in society, give its tone and character. 

One can not present a complete gallery of the 
Senate in the space of a single chapter. I have 
chosen a few characteristic figures, the leaders past, 
present, and to come, the small business man who 
seeks social preferment or the destruction of a title 
in Washington, such as Calder and Frelinghuysen, 
the politician who likes to play the game better in 
the Capitol than at home, like New, the aristocrat 
who escapes from the boredom of doing nothing 
into the boredom of a democratic chamber, the 
gradgrind legislator of whom there are few like 
Smoot, the half party man, half bloc man like 
Capper. 

All of these men belong to a party and are limited 
by that party's weakness, its lack of principles, 
the caution which it has to use in avoiding the 
alienation of its loosely held supporters. The 

192 




SENATOR WILLIAM M. CALDER OF NEW YORK 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

party program is something on which all kinds 
of people can stand. Necessarily the party men 
in the Senate are tied down to a cause that is 
largely negative. They can not be other than 
feeble and ineffective figtu'es. 

The weakness of parties has led to the emergence 
of a few outstanding individual Senators who must 
be examined to see whether around them the new 
Senate which will come with the shift of power and 
responsibility to the legislative branch can be built. 
The most brilliant and interesting of them is 
Senator Borah, but it is significant that the farm 
bloc looking for a leader did not ttu-n to him, but 
chose rather much less significant and effective 
men. 

Yet the Idaho Senator seems the natural rallying 
point for any movement which will give new life 
and force to the Senate. He is established. He is 
the most potent single individual in the upper 
house. So far as there is any opposition to Presi- 
dent Harding and his friends, Mr. Borah is that 
opposition. His is the intelligence which inspires 
the Democratic party when it consents to be in- 
spired by intelligence. He believes that the 
revolution has come, not one of street fighting and 
bomb throwing but a peaceful change which has 
made the old parties meaningless, destroyed the old 
authorities and set raen free for the new grouping 
that is to take place. Others in the Senate see this 
and are frightened. Borah sees it and is glad. 

13 193 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

His bonds are loosed and he is a vastly braver, 
sincerer and more effective Senator than ever 
before. 

It is absurd to use the word radical of Borah, 
Johnson, or LaFoUette, for none of them is truly 
radical; but if one must do so for the lack of any 
better term, then Borah is the conservatives' 
radical. The angriest reactionary remains calm 
when his name is mentioned, perhaps because 
Borah never gets into a passion himself and never 
addresses himself to popular prejudice. He is not 
a mob orator. He is impersonal in his appeals. 
No one any longer suspects him of an ambition to 
be President. He seems, like a hermit, to have 
divorced himself from the earthly passions of 
politics and to have become pure intellect operating 
in the range of public affairs. He is almost a sage 
while still a Senator. 

If we had the custom of electing our Ex- Presi- 
dents to the Senate, you can imagine one of them, 
beyond the average of intelligence, freed from 
ambition through having filled the highest office, 
occupying a place like that of Borah. 

Borah perhaps likes it too well ever to descend 
into the market place and become a leader. His 
is an enviable lot, for he is the most nearly free man 
in Washington; why should he exchange the im- 
munity he possesses for a small group of followers? 
Besides he believes in the power of oratory rather 
than in the power of organization. He said to me 

194 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

at the Republican Convention of 19 16, "I could 
stampede this crowd for Roosevelt." The crowd 
was thoroughly organized against Roosevelt. 

Nature made him an orator, one of the greatest 
in the country. And he has come to be satisfied 
with the gift he has. The unimportance of his 
state, Idaho, has freed him from any illusions about 
himself with respect to the Presidency. The habit 
of carrying a comb in his vest pocket marks him as 
free from the social ambitions which mmiber -.nore 
victims in the Senate than the ambition for the 
presidency. He is almost a disembodied spirit 
politically, of the revolution pie discerns he will be 
a spectator. 

Hiram Johnson is a declining figure. I see no 
reason to modify the conclusion which was reached 
about him in the Mirrors of Washington, that he 
thought more of men than of principles and especi- 
ally of one man, Johnson. The test of his sincerity 
came when the vote was reached on the tinseating 
of Senator Newberry for spending too much money 
in the Michigan primaries. 

Johnson's great issue a year before had been 
sanctity of popular nominations. Yet when he 
had an opportunity to speak and act against a 
brazen even though foolish attempt to buy a 
nomination, he was rushing wildly across the 
continent, arriving after the vote had been 
taken. 

On reaching Washington, he called his news- 

195 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

paper friends before him to explain the difficulties 
and delays that had made him late. When he had 
finished a nasal voice from the press remarked, 
"Senator, there will be great public sympathy 
with you as a victim of the railroads. But the 
people will only know how great their loss has been 
if you will tell them now how you would have voted 
if you had been here." Johnson adjourned the 
meeting hastily without a reply. 

The absence from the roll call and the theatrical 
attempt to make it appear accidental were typical. 
Johnson had won the Michigan primaries in the 
national campaign of 1920. The delegates were in 
control of Newberry's political friends. They re- 
mained firm for Johnson throughout the balloting. 
Johnson avoided voting against their leader al- 
though his principles required that he should lead 
the fight for his unseating. 

Johnson has always over-emphasized Johnson. 
At the Progressive convention in 191 2 when 
Roosevelt was nominated for the Presidency and 
Johnson for the Vice-Presidency, it was proposed, 
since both were in attendance, to bring both on the 
stage and introduce them to the delegates. The 
natural order was Roosevelt first, since he was the 
nominee for President and since he was, moreover, 
one of the most distinguished figures in the world, 
and Johnson, since he had second place, second. 
But Johnson would go second to no man. Either 
he must show himself on the stage first or not at all. 

196 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

Finally it was compromised by presenting them 
together at the same moment, holding hands upon 
the platform. 

Johnson can never see himself in proper per- 
spective. At the Progressive convention he was 
more important than Roosevelt. In the Newberry 
case his political fortunes were more important 
than honest primaries. 

Senator Reed of Missouri is possessed of a devil. 
He is a satirist turned politician. He has the 
saeva indignatio of Swift. American life with its 
stupidity, its facile optimism, its gullibility, its 
easy compromises, its hypocrisy, fills him with rage. 
His face is shot red with passion. His voice is 
angry. He is a defeated idealist left in this barren 
generation without an ideal. He might have been 
led away by the war as so many were, as Wilson 
was, into the belief that out of its sufferings would 
come a purified and elevated himianity. But Reed 
is hard to lead away. Where other men see beauty 
and hope he searches furiously for sham. Where 
other men say cheerfully half a loaf is better than 
no bread he puts the half loaf on the scales and 
proves that it is short weight. 

An old prosecuting attorney, he believes that 
guilt is everywhere. He is always out for a con- 
viction. If the evidence is insufficient he uses all 
the arts, disingenuous presentations, appeals to 
piejudice, not because he is indifferent to justice 
but because the accused ought to be hanged anyway, 

197 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

and he is not going to let lack of evidence stand in 
the way of that salutary consimimation. 

He conducts a lifelong and passionate fight 
against the American practice of "getting away 
with it." Shall Hoover get away with it as a great 
and pure man, the benefactor of the race! Not 
while Jim Reed has breath in his body ! Here is an 
American idol, tear it down, exhibit its clay feet! 
Shall Wilson "get away with it," with his League 
of Nations and his sublimated world set free from 
all the baser passions of the past? Not while any 
acid remains on Jim Reed's tongue ! 

Reed is sincere. He hates sham. He neverthe- 
less himself uses sham to fight sham. He is the 
nearest thing to a great satirist this coimtry has 
developed. And the amazing consideration is 
that in a nation which dislikes satire a satirist 
should be elected by the suffrage of his fellows. 

Probably it is only in politics that we tolerate 
satire. In self-government we only half believe. 
We are divided in our own minds. We make laws 
furiously and laugh at the laws we make. We 
pretend that the little men of politics are great and 
then privately we indicate our real perception of 
the truth by telling how small they are. Politics 
is suspect and it stamps you as a person of pene- 
tration to show that you are aware what sham and 
dishonesty there is in them. It is almost as good 
an evidence of a superior mind as to say, "Of 
course I don't believe what I read in the news- 

198 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

papers." Now satire is enjoyed by superior rainds, 
and it is only with regard to politics that we as a 
people have superior minds, politics not being like 
business the pursuit of honest everyday folk. 

Jim Reed is then that part of ourselves which 
tells us that self-government is a good deal of a 
sham, in the hands of amusing charlatans. We 
tolerate him in perhaps the only place where we 
would tolerate a satirist, in the Senate. And in 
the Senate they fear him. 

He was attacking the Four Power Pact . * ' People 
say," he declared, * ' that this ends the Anglo- Japan- 
ese alliarice. I do not find it in the pact. I do not 
find it nominated in the bond," he shouted. And 
the friends of the pact sat silent afraid of Reed's 
power as a debater, until Senator Lenroot having 
studied the doctiment several minutes in the cloak- 
room read the plain language of the agreement to 
end the alliance. Reed almost "got away with 
it" himself. But this is not leadership. One 
does not follow a satirist. One makes him a 
privileged character at most. 

Reed and Borah are privileged characters each in 
his own way. The privilege of being "queer " is 
as old as the herd itself. The harmless insane man 
was almost sacred in primitive society. The 
"fool" was the only man whose disrespect did not 
amount to Use majeste. The wisdom of the " fool " 
was regarded with a certain awe and admiration. 
But the death rate among those who sought this 

199 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

franchise must have been high. It must be per- 
sonahty which decides who survives and achieves 
this Hcense and who does not, a nice capacity for 
adjustment, a rare sense of what the crowd will 
endure. Borah and Reed have it, LaFollette has 
not or has not chosen to exercise it. 

George Moore somewhere says that if you can 
convince a woman that it is all play, all Pan and 
nymph, between you and her, you have the perfect 
way of a man with a maid, when his aim is some- 
thing short of matrimony. But if you are too 
serious about it — ! LaFollette is perhaps too seri- 
ous about it. If he could have said what he had 
to say with a laugh and so as to raise a laugh he 
might have been privileged like Reed, or, if he had 
to be serious, he should have been serious like 
Borah, in a detached and impersonal fashion; then 
perhaps he might still have been something less 
than the public enemy that he is. But LaFollette 
is serious, terribly serious, terribly in earnest. He 
has had convictions, climg to them, and probably 
suffered more for them than any man in 
Washington. 

The Wisconsin Senator is one of the least under- 
stood men in public life. In the Senate he speaks 
violently, with a harsh voice and an excess of 
manner. He is small and some of this loudness 
and emphasis is no doubt that compensation for 
lack of stature and presence to which men imcon- 
sciously resort ; some of it is an exterior which has 

200 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

been cultivated to cover up an unusually shy and 
sensitive heart. The character in history and fic- 
tion which most intrigues him is Hamlet, that gentle 
soul unfit for life. He has spent years studying 
the shy Dane. He himself is a Hamlet who has 
taken up arms against a sea of troubles. The 
"queer" man who would gain a franchise for his 
"queerness" must not be sensitive. The crowd 
likes better to persecute than to tolerate. 

Then too LaFollette entered the Senate when 
minorities were less tolerable than they are today. 
He got the stamp of impossible when Roosevelt 
led a movement in his direction and he refused to 
be a part of it. Thus he became isolated, neither 
Progressive nor Old Guard. You can not safely be 
too uncompromising, too serious. It makes no 
difference if you were right in rejecting both 
wings of the party as reactionary which they 
speedily proved to be. It makes no difference if 
you were right in opposing the war, and no one is so 
sure today that LaFollette was wrong in doing 
so as men were when it was proposed to expel him 
from the Senate. Justification after the fact does 
no good. It is not your wrongness that they hate ; 
it's your uncompromising quality, and that re- 
mains more unbreakable than ever. 

An imusual loyalty explains the unwillingness to 
compromise. LaFollette attaches himself deeply. 
A characteristic act was his leaving the Senate for 
months to nurse a sick son back to health. It sets 

20I 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

him apart from most men, who do not let sickness 
in the family interfere with their business and per- 
form their full duty when they hire a trained nurse. 
People think of LaFollette, the public man, as an 
egoist but this nursing of his son showed the utmost 
absence of egoism. And so it is with all his intimate 
relations, which are unusually sweet and tender. 

Whatever he is like privately, publicly he is 
placed, rated, catalogued; the general mind is 
made up. The farm bloc no more turned to him 
than to Borah for leadership. He will always 
remain isolated. 

Now that party discipline has been broken down, 
what nonconformist Senators suffer most from is 
the tyranny of the teapot. Senator Kenyon re- 
ferred to it when he said Newberry on trial for fit- 
ness for his seat "floated back into the Senate on an 
ocean of tea." An unparliamentary version of the 
same reference to the social influence is : " The Sen- 
ate is one long procession of dinners and hootch." 

If you are regular politically you are regular 
socially. Given the habit of voting with the 
crowd, of putting others at ease by a not too great 
display of intellect, a good cook, a pre-war cellar, 
and a not impossible wife, and you belong to the 
Senatorial middle class, the new rich insurance 
agents, lawyers, miners, and manufacturers who 
control the fate of the socially ambitious. You 
may not be invited to the Wadsworths', or may be 
seldom asked there. But you are accepted by 

202 



THE UPPER HOUSE BOOBOISIE 

what Mencken might call the wealthy "booboi- 
sie," the circle Mr. Harding frequented before he 
was advanced to the White House. 

If you don't you are of the Senatorial proletariat. 
You are invited out seldom or not at all. You 
have to organize a little set of intellectuals, not 
found in the Senate, for your wife's tea parties. 

Senator Kenyon was a moderate nonconformist. 
Intellectually he was honest, but not strong, so 
that an outsider might have thought that his hon- 
esty and independence would be overlooked. But 
he was never accepted by the "booboisie." He 
was virtually cold shouldered out of the Senate, for 
it was with immense relief that he escaped from 
teapot ostracism to the seciorer social area of the 
Federal bench. 

I repeat a bit of gossip about the Iowa Senator 
without vouching for it. When he was retiring, it 
is said, a reporter asked, "What can be done with 
the Senate?" "Nothing," replied the lowan, 
"The only thing to do is to destroy it." If he said 
this he really flattered the "booboisie." Destruc- 
tion is reserved for wicked things like Sodom and 
Gomorrah. But the Senate is not wicked. It is 
good, honest in the sense of not stealing, well- 
meaning, timid, petty, tea-drinking, human, 
commonplace. You can't destroy it imless you 
have something to put in its place, and there is 
nothing. Much better turn it over to the blocs 
and see what they will do with it. 

203 



CHAPTER XI 

A PEAK OF REALITY THRUSTS UP ON THE LEVEL 
PLAIN OF SHAMS 

As well fear blocs and minorities as fear the 
centrifugal force on the ground that it is seeking to 
pull us off the face of the earth. Minorities are the 
centrifugal force of politics. They maintain the 
balance of forces which makes political existence 
possible. Without them the State would become 
imbearable; it would destroy us or we should be 
compelled to destroy it. 

We have just passed through a period, the war, 
in which minorities were suppressed, in which the 
general will brooked no resistance, in which the 
bodies of men between certain ages and the minds 
of men and women of all ages were brought into 
compulsory service of the State. The mental 
draft dodger went to jail just as much as the physi- 
cal draft dodger. 

A Chief of an Industrial Workers of the World 
Longshoremans' Union was sentenced for twenty 
years because he was an I. W. W., although under 
his direction his organization handled efficiently 

204 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

ill the munitions of war shipped from Philadelphia. 
He "obstructed the war" by his thoughts as an 
[. W. W., even though his actions as a citizen 
contributed to success in the war. 

One may tolerate diuring a national emergency 
:he oppression that results from the crushing of 
ninorities, but in time of peace it is only in the 
valance of political forces that political existence 
nay go on. 

All freedom is the work of minorities and so is all 
change. Respect for opinion is dearly bought by 
:hem. Majority views were all once minority 
iriews. Some political theorists even go so far as to 
5ay that all governments, no matter what apparent 
precautions are taken to represent majorities, are 
really conducted by minorities. Without the 
effective resistance of minorities the general will 
laay become tyrannous or without the stimulus 
they afford it may become inert. 

The blocs and minorities that are appearing in 
American public life are accomplishing a measirre 
3f decentralization . The highly centralized govern- 
ment which we recently built up is itself passing 
into the control of the various economic sub- 
divisions of society. In them rather than in it is 
[coming to be final authority. 

Take freight rates for an illustration . Originally 
they were localized, in the unrestricted control of 
the railroad managers. Then they were slightly 
centralized in the partial control of state and 

205 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

partial control of national authorities. Then 
control was wholly centralized in the Inter-State 
Commerce Commission at Washington, the States 
being denied effective authority even over rates 
within their own borders. 

There you have bureaucracy at its worst, author- 
ity in the hands of an appointive commission, 
thousands of miles, in many cases, from the place 
where it was applied, and a public feeling its im- 
potence, which is the negation of self-government. 

Then comes the first step in decentralization. 
No locality, no State was big enough to reach out 
and get back the authority over its own railroad 
service that it once had . B ut the organized farmers 
of the whole country were able to take into their 
hands the power over the railroads as it affected 
them. Nominally the Inter-State Commerce Com- 
mission still makes rates. Practically the farmers, 
having the balance of power in the House and 
Senate, say what rates they want on agricultural 
products and get them. That is decentralization. 

The division into States which the jealous colon- 
ists preserved in forming the Union has largely 
lost its significance. Men divide now according 
to their interests, not according to boundaries that 
may be learned in the school geographies. As the 
States weakened many of their powers gradually 
tended to be centralized in the national govern- 
ment. As the newer economic subdivisions of 
society become organized and self-assertive some 

206 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

Di the power thus centralized in Washington de- 
volves upon them, not legally or formally, but 
ictually and in practice. They constitute minori- 
ties too large to be denied. 

It is only through decentralization that popular 
nstitutions can be kept alive, only through it that 
2^overnment remains near enough to the people to 
lold their interest and only through it that freedom 
:rom an oppressive State is preserved. 

Why should minorities be regarded with such 
I version? Why should President Harding de- 
claim against them so persistently? Oiu* Federal 
Constitution is written full of safeguards for minori- 
:ies. The reservoir of power is in the minorities, 
:he States, the local subdivisions which feared the 
oss of their identity and independence through 
:he central government they were creating. 

Only powers expressly yielded by the local units 
nay be assiimed by the Republic. The States 
Nere the minorities ; they felt when they joined the 
Jnion that their rights as minorities had to be 
ealously guarded, in order that they might have 
:he realities of self-government. 

You have in the rule that the small State must 
lave as many Senators as the large State a sharp 
issertion of the right of geographical minorities, 
[f the larger States had not accepted this principle 
:he smaller States would never have joined the 
Union. 

Gradually these geographical minorities lost 

207 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

their importance in the pubHc consciousness. Oiir 
people had come and kept coming to this country 
from the ends of the earth. Arriving here they 
continued to be nomads, sweeping over the West 
in search of new pasture lands or more fertile soil, 
moving from the farm to the city and thrusting 
their roots in nowhere. No difference of language 
or customs set up arbitrary frontiers. 

Moreover we were the first people to settle a 
land where modern methods of locomotion de- 
stroyed the use and wont of limited localities. 
Instead of being citizens of New York united with 
the citizens of New Jersey, Connecticut, and the 
rest of them for the common defense, as our fore- 
fathers imagined, we became citizens of the United 
States, which was divided into New York, New 
Jersey, Connecticut, and the rest for purposes of 
policing, road-making, and other functions that 
could be better managed at home than from 
Washington. 

A State began to assiime about the same place in 
the Union that a coimty does in a State. 

The basic reality for oiu" forefathers was the 
State, the Union existing for the convenience of the 
States. The basic reality for us is the Union, the 
States existing for the convenience of the Union, 
which is too vast to administer everything from a 
central point. 

As the geographical subdivisions lost their signi- 
ficance economic subdivisions rose to take their 

208 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

Dlace. The farmer of Kansas began to have more 

n common with the farmer of Iowa than he had 

;vith the coal miner of his own State. The nation- 

mde organization of farmers resulted, and it is a / 

nore real unit in the political consciousness than 

s that unit on which the Fathers laid such stress, 

;he State. It is a minority that has no reserve 

•ights under the Constitution but which achieves 

ts rights by force of numbers and organization. 

These economic subdivisions are the reality 
;oday. The United States is a union of the State 
)f Agriculture, the State of Labor, the State of 
Vianufacturing, and a dozen other occupational 
states of greater or less importance. And after all 
vhy should not Agriculture, Manufacturing, Labor, 
foreign, and Domestic Commerce form a imion for 
he national defense, carefully reserving essential 
)Owers to themselves as States, just as the thirteen 
)riginal colonies did ? Why should we let this new 
)olitical organism keep us awake nights? 

Nationally we have a complex on the subject of 
lisunion. Fortunate perhaps is the country which 
s subject to the pressure of a foreign enemy 
)n its border, as France is, for example, to that of 
j-ermany. If you have a convenient foe to be 
iraid of you do not have to be afraid of yourselves, 
t seems to be the rule that nations like individ- 
Lals must have fears and the American phobia is 
hat this country will proceed amoeba-wise by 
cission, into several countries. When we feel a 
'4 209 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

weakening at the center we feel a horror in the 
peripheries. 

We fought one great war to prevent a breaking 
up of the Union and whenever we hear the word 
"section, " we become apprehensive. And just as 
"section" fills o\ir minds with fear of cleavage 
upon geographical lines, so "class" arouses anxiety 
over cleavage upon social lines. "Class" calls up 
the spectre of socialism. "Bloc" moreover is a 
word of unhappy associations. It brings into the 
imagination Europe with all its turmoil and its 
final catastrophe. 

The Civil War left us with one complex. The 
European War left us with another. The agricul- 
tural bloc touches both, suggesting division and 
upon European lines. Being agricultural it is 
vaguely sectional; being the projection of a single 
interest into national politics so as to cut across 
parties, it follows European precedents. It more- 
over derives its name from abroad. 

Call it log-rolling by the farmers, however, and it 
relates to the habitual method of American legisla- 
tion. It conforms to our best traditions. We 
never spoke of the groups which filled pork barrels 
of the past as blocs, but every river and harbor 
bill was the work of minorities uniting to raid the 
treasury. The two recent amendments to the 
Constitution, granting the suffrage to women and 
prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic 
beverages, were also achieved minorities. 

2IO 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

The organized minorities of the past dissolved 
when their end was obtained. They had a specific 
rather than a general purpose. Usually it was a 
moral purpose, the prohibition of alcoholic drinks, 
or political justice for woman. Never until recently 
did a minority raise the economic interests of one 
section of society against those of the rest of society 
and promise to keep on raising them. The farm 
bloc is the first permanent economic minority to 
organize itself effectively for political action. 

The phenomenon is not that the bloc impairs 
our political system; it does not; majority rule is 
always tempered by minority rule or it becomes 
either a tyranny or a dead thing. It is that it 
threatens our pocketbooks. It obtains low rail- 
road rates on farm products. It shifts taxes from 
farmers to the rest of us. It secures for farmers 
special aid in the form of government credits. 

Nevertheless its appearance is the most hopeful 
sign in Washington that we may emerge from the 
governmental bog into which we have simk. We 
had centralized to the point of creating an immense 
and dull bureaucracy headed by a weak Executive 
and equally weak Congress . Interest in self-govern- 
ment was being destroyed by the mere remoteness 
and irresponsiveness of the mechanism. "The 
parties are exactly alike. What difference does it 
make which is in power?" 

We had created an organization too vast for any 
one to take it in hand. And the only remedy in 

211 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

that case is to break the organization down. De- 
centralization into States was impossible, for men 
never go back to outworn forms, and State boun- 
daries had ceased to be the real lines of division in 
American society. A way out of this difficulty 
has been found through the seizing of power by 
occupational organizations, of which the farm bloc 
is the most famous and most successful. 

We could not go on as we are, with an enfeebled 
Executive and an enfeebled Congress. And, if I 
have analyzed the situation correctly, we shall have 
no more strong Executives, until some national 
emergency unites the people temporarily for the 
accomplishment of some single purpose. The 
Executive is the greatest common divisor of a 
diverse society. Congress, equally, is weak so 
long as it remains a Congress based upon the 
present theory of party government, for the party 
has to be stretched out too thin, has to represent 
too many different views to have character and 
purpose. Steadily parties are being driven more 
and more to pure negation. Wilson was elected 
the first time on the negative issue, "No more 
Roosevelt and his radicalism," and the second 
time on the negative issue, "He kept us out of 
war," and Harding upon the negative issue, "No 
more Wilson." 

If the two existing parties cannot be positive 
and constructive, "Why not scrap them both?" 
asks Mr. Samuel G. Blythe. Why not, indeed? 

212 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

except for the fact that you can find no principle 
upon which to found a third party. If there were a 
positive principle upon which a majority of the 
voters would agree the existing parties would grab 
for it. They are colorless and negative not by 
choice but by necessity. 

Let us look at the situation. The public is dis- 
gusted with the existing parties and becoming 
indifferent to the possibilities of the suffrage and of 
popular government, an unhealthy sign. A new 
party is out of the question, for to succeed any new 
party must be broad enough to cover all sorts and 
conditions of men, divergent groups and interests. 
It must at once have the defects of the old parties. 

So long as parties "must be careful," to quote 
Mr. Harding, executives must "be careful" and 
Congress organized on the party basis "must be 
careful." We gravitate toward negation. 

We face in government perhaps what it is said 
we face in industry and in war, organization on 
such a scale that men are no longer masters of it. 
Under such circimistances there is nothing to do 
but to break it up into its component parts. That 
is what the group or bloc system is, a resolution 
into component parts. 

It is precisely what will happen in the industrial 
field if the great combinations of twenty years ago 
prove too unwieldy. The vertical trust, the single 
industry, organized like the Stinnes group or like 
the Henry Ford industry from the raw material 

213 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

to the finished product but seeking no monopoly, 
promises to take the place of the horizontal trust of 
monopolistic tendency. The bloc is a vertical 
organization appearing in the field of politics, 
which hitherto has been dominated by the horizon- 
tal organization of the parties. 

A vertical organization, like everything vertical 
in this world, tends to rest upon the solid earth. 
It has its base in reality. The bloc introduces 
reality into public life. It will be represented by 
men who are not ashamed to stand frankly for the 
selfish interests of their group. 

When we banished selfish interests from the 
government a few years ago we banished all in- 
terests — and even all interest, too — leaving very 
little but hypocrisy and timidity. The representa- 
tives of a group will not have to be all things to all 
men as our party men are, but only one thing to 
one kind of men. 

If we cannot get our present parties to stand for 
anything, if for the same reason we cannot form a 
new party to stand for anything, we can at least 
introduce principles into politics through the force 
of group support. Blocs will be positive, not 
merely negative as the parties have become. They 
do not have to please everybody. They can and 
must be constructive. 

The clash of ideas which we miss between parties 
may take place between blocs. I am assuming, as 
everyone in Washington does, that the farm bloc 

214 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

is only a forerunner of other similar political efforts, 
for every economic interest which is organized 
among the voters may extend itself vertically into 
Congress. 

There will be a gain in decentralization, there will 
be a gain in honesty, there will be a gain in con- 
structive political effort through the direct repre- 
sentation of the real interests of society in Congress. 

Nor does there appear any danger of the break 
up into utterly unrelated minorities such as has 
taken place, let us say, in France and Germany. 
We have what most European countries has not, 
an elected Executive who plays an important part 
in legislation, the President with his veto power. 
So long as the presidential office retains this func- 
tion, and it is always likely to retain it, there must 
be national parties within which the minorities, 
interests, or occupational groups, must cooperate. 

Groups will not be able in this country as in 
Europe to elect members of the national legislature 
independently, then form a combination and pick 
their own Executive. They are under compulsion 
to elect the Executive at large by the votes of the 
whole people ; they must hold together enough for 
that purpose. 

The centrifugal tendency of minorities in the 
American system is thus effectively restrained. 
Groups must work within the parties, as the agri- 
cultural bloc has done and as the proposed liberal 
workers bloc promises to do. A handful of seats 

215 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

in Congress alone is not worth fighting for: that is 
why all third party movements have failed. A 
handful of seats in a European parliament is worth 
having ; it may dictate the choice of the Executive ; 
that is why parties are numerous abroad. In 
other words "bloc" is a useful name as indicating 
a radical departure in our political system but it 
contains no threat for this country of the political 
disintegration prevailing in Europe. 

The names Republican and Democrat are likely 
to last as convenient designations of the accord 
reached for national purposes between the vertical 
organizations which represent economic or other 
group interests of the people. Unity is thus pre- 
served as well as diversity, which is what upon 
geographical lines, the Father of the Constitution 
sought. 

You have only to regard the agricultural bloc 
to perceive the truth of this analysis. Primarily 
its members are Republicans or Democrats and 
only secondarily representatives of agriculture. 
They have rejected leadership of a separatist 
tendency, choosing the moderate guidance of Mr. 
Kenyon and Mr. Capper rather than the more 
individualistic generalship of Mr. Borah or Mr. La 
Follette. Some day their successors may be 
primarily representatives of agriculture and only 
secondarily Republicans or Democrats, but in one 
of the two big parties they must retain their stand- 
ing, or share the fate of third parties, a fate made 

216 




SENATOR ARTHUR I. CAPPER OF KANSAS 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

inevitable by the necessity electing of a chief 
executive at large. 

When the farmer votes for legislators who will 
represent primarily the farm interest, and the 
laborer for legislators who will represent primarily 
the labor interest and the business man for legisla- 
tors who will represent the business interests self- 
government will assume a new importance, even 
though all of these interests will have to be sub- 
ordinated to the general interest for the sake of 
cooperation with a party in the choice of an 
Executive. 

I have compared the group organization to the 
vertical trust of the industrial world. The re- 
semblance is striking. Take the instance of Herr 
Stinness, the most interesting figiu-e in manufac- 
turing today. Originally he was a coal mine owner. 
Instead of spreading laterally to monopolize coal 
he builds upward from his raw material to finished 
products. He adds iron to his holdings and manu- 
factures electrical supplies and electricity. He 
owns his own ships for the carrying of his products. 
He would buy railroads from the German govern- 
ment for the transporting of them. He owns 
newspapers for political action. And the whole or- 
ganization culminates with himself in the Reich- 
stag, and in international relations where he is 
almost as significant a figure as the German 
government itself. 

Mr. Henry Ford, a lesser person, started at the 

217 



BEHIND THE ^^RRORS 

other end and organized do"^-nward to the raw 
material. He now o'^tis his own mines, his rail- 
roads for shipping, his raw material and products, 
his steel foimdries, the factories which turn out his 
finished products, his weekly newspaper, and he is 
himself a political figiu-e of no one yet knows how 
much importance. 

The farmers are organized for social purposes, 
for the distribution of information among them- 
selves, for cooperation in bm-ing and selling, for 
maintaining a lobby at Washington and finally for 
political action. Political action crowns an or- 
ganization which ser\-es all the purposes for which 
imion is required. 

Practically ever}' other interest is organized to 
the point of maintaining a lobby at Washington. 
Only the farmers have developed organization in 
Congress. Only they have adapted their organiza- 
tion to all their needs, social and political. Only 
they have the perfect vertical trust running straight 
up from the weekly entertainment in the union or 
bureau to the Senate in Washington, where their 
Senators do the bidding of their agent, Mr. Gray 
Silver. 

Indispensable to effective special interest repre- 
sentation seems to be an organization for other 
than political purposes which brings the voters of 
a class or occupation together. Labor has such an 
organization in its unions. Business has it perhaps 
in its Chambers of Commerce and Boards of Trade. 

218 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

Either of them has the means at its disposal for 
mitating the farmers and developing a bloc in the 
lational legislature. 

It is natural that the farm interest should be the 
irst to push its way beyond the lobby or propa- 
ganda stage at Washington to that of organized 
representation on the floor of Congress. Agricul- 
ture is the single interest or the immensely pre- 
lominating interest in many States. A Senator or 
Representative from such a state may safely con- 
sider himself a representative of agriculture. But 
n a more fully developed community there is a 
iiversity of interests. Where there is capital there 
s also labor. Moreover most of the industrial 
States have also their agricultural interest. It is not 
safe for an Eastern Senator or Representative, as 
:he situation now stands, to identify himself with 
my minority. He must at least pretend to "repre- 
sent the whole people." 

If the vertical movement in politics proceeds, as 
^t almost inevitably must, it will manifest itself 
effectively first in the lower house. Congress 
iistricts are small units. In an industrial State one 
iistrict may be prevailingly agricultural, another 
prevailingly labor, another prevailingly commercial. 
Groups operating within a party will tend to parcel 
Dut the districts among themselves holding their 
support of each other's candidates, as the Liberal 
and Labor parties have often done in England. 

The Senate will be less responsive. States are 

219 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

large units and, except in farming regions, are not 
prevailingly of one interest. But a division may be 
effected like that which now gives one Senator to 
the eastern and another to the western, or one to 
the urban and another to the rural part of the State. 
One Senator may go to business and another to 
agriculture or to labor as the case may be. 

What I have just written is by way of illustra- 
tion. I have spoken of agricviltural, labor and 
business blocs not because these are the only divi- 
sions of society that may be organized for political 
purpose but because they already have the basic 
machinery and seem certain to thrust upwards 
till they are prominently represented in Congress. 
Other minority interests are already showing 
themselves, as for example the soldiers of the late 
war and the inland waterways group. These and 
others like them, some permanent and some 
temporary, will cut across the main subdivisions, 
so that men who are divided on one interest will 
be united on another and thus furnish a further 
cement in the body politic in addition to the 
necessity of joint action upon the presidency. 

Thus there is less danger of our being ruled by 
minorities than there is of minorities having to 
surrender too much of their purposes for the sake 
of imity among themselves and of oiir thus being in 
spite of their organization little better off than we 
are now, reduced by the sheer mass that has to b© 
moved to a policy of inaction and negation. 

220 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

In an earlier chapter I analyzed the Senate to 
show how weak and will-less it is and how inferior 
is its personnel, how prostrate it lies before any- 
powerful minority which has a purpose and the 
tvill to carry it out. I used the Senate as typical of 
Congress; a desire to save space and to avoid 
repetitions kept me from a similar study of the 
House. In the same way the parties lie ready for 
:he uses of minorities. They are will-less. They 
lave no aim and express no imity because when the 
)ld pioneer will to exploit as quickly as possible 
;he national resources without regard to waste, 
physical or social, ceased to operate, there was no 
mity, except, as I have explained, for temporary 
purposes, for social defense under Roosevelt and 
or national defense under Wilson, two essentially 
legative ends. 

Mr. Will H. Hays trying to tell the Republican 
enate how to vote on the League covenant, was a 
ess powerful figure than was Mr. Wayne B. 
/Vheeler ordering it to vote that more than one 
lalf of one per cent of alcohol in a beverage was 
ntoxicating, or Mr. Gray Silver forcing it to extend 
Tcdits to farmers, or Colonel Taylor frightening it 
nto voting for a soldiers' bonus. 

The old party bosses are dead. No machine 
gader will control as many delegates in the next 
lational convention as will Mr. Gray Silver. So 
ar as delegates are now led they are led by Sena- 
ors and Representatives. A Senate group chose 

221 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Mr. Harding at Chicago. And Senators and Repre- 
sentatives lie at the mercy of organized minorities. 

The RepubHcan party in 1920 was an agglomera- 
tion of minorities, held together by no better 
binder than the negation of Wilsonism. There 
were the German vote, the Irish vote and the other 
foreign votes; the farmer vote, the business vote, 
the old American vote, the frightened vote, the 
herd vote and every conceivable kind of vote. It 
was in effect a bloc, in the European sense of that 
word, a combination of small parties. These 
minorities were mostly unorganized in 1920 or 
imperfectly organized; their development ver- 
tically is now going on. Some of them will appear 
as definitely upon the floor of the 1924 convention 
as the agricultural group has upon the floor of 
Congress. 

With the organization of minorities Congress 
becomes important, for it is in Congress that the 
Fathers in their wisdom provided for the expres- 
sion of minorities. The Presidency, according to 
the argimient used before in this book, dwindles to 
a charming embodiment of that great American ne- 
gative — nation-wide public opinion. The only or- 
dinarily available positive — group opinion — finds its 
play in the Legislature. There will be determined 
upon whose shoulders the taxes will be shifted, 
who shall have effective rebates in freight rates, 
and more important still, who shall use for his 
group interests the government control of credit. 

222 









GREY SILVER, THE MAN BEHIND THE FARM BLOC 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

Where these questions are being decided there 
pubHc attention will concentrate. There will be 
the stress upon government. 

As Congress becomes more important better 
men will be drawn into it. There will be a gain to 
public life in this country from emphasis upon the 
parliamentary side of government. As it is now 
only one prize in American politics is worth while 
and that is the Presidency. And there is no known 
rule by which men may attain to it. Candidates 
for it are chosen at random, from governing a State, 
from an obscure position in the Senate, from the 
army, it may be; in no case does it come as the 
certain reward of national service. 

And if, as happened when Mr. Roosevelt and 
Mr. Wilson were made President, really able men 
attain the office, they may serve their country only 
four years, or eight years at most, and then must 
retire from view. In England, for example, similar 
men are at the head of the government or leading 
the opposition for the greater part of a lifetime. 
English public life would inevitably look richer 
than oiu*s even were it not richer, for when they 
breed a statesman in England they use him for 
years. We discard him after four or eight years. 
We have not the system for developing statesmen 
and when by chance we find one we waste him. 

We put our faith in the jack-of -all-trades and the 
amateur. We have the cheerful notion that the 
"crisis produces the man." This is nothing more 

223 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

than the justice illusion which is lodged in the 
minds of men, an idea, religious in its origin, that 
no time of trial would arrive unless the man to 
meet it were benignantly sent along with it, a 
denial of human responsibility, an encouragement 
to the happy-go-lucky notion that everything 
always comes out right in the end. 

The world, in going through the greatest crisis 
in history has controverted this cheerful belief, for 
it has not produced "the man " either here or else- 
where. No one appeared big enough to prevent the 
war. No one appeared big enough to shorten the 
war. No one appeared big enough to effect a real 
peace. And no one appeared big enough to guide 
this country wisely either in the war or in the 
making of peace, which is still going on. 

Only in parliamentary life is there enough per- 
manency and enough opportunity for the breeding 
of statesmen. We shall never have them while the 
Presidency with its hazards and its wastes is 
stressed as it has been in recent years. 

And Congress itself must be reformed before it 
will encourage and develop ability. The seniority 
rule, to which reference has been made before, 
must be abolished before talent will have its oppor- 
tunity in the legislative branch. 

One of the first things that aggressive minorities 
would be likely to do is to reach out for the impor- 
tant committee chairmanships. Already the sen- 
iority rule has been broken in the House, when 

224 



A PEAK OF REALITY 

Martin Madden was made Chairman of the Appro- 
priations Committee instead of the senior Republi- 
can, an inadequate person from Minnesota. 

And in any case the seniority rule will be severely 
tested in the Senate. If Senator McCumber is 
defeated in North Dakota and Senator Lodge is 
defeated or dies, Senator Borah will be in line 
to be chairman of the important Foreign Relations 
Committee. When Senator Cummins, who is 
sick, dies or retires and Senator Townsend is de- 
feated, which now seems likely. Senator LaFollette 
will be in line to be chairman of the Senate Com- 
mittee on Interstate Commerce. Both irregulars 
will then attain places of vast power unless the 
seniority rule is abrogated. 

Thus even the machine in the Senate will soon 
be under pressure to do away with the absurd 
method of awarding mere length of service with 
power and place. 

Minorities when they determine to take the 
Senate and the House out of the enfeebled grasp 
of incompetent regularity will inevitably find 
precedents already established for them. 

A richer public life will come from the breakdown 
of the safeguards of mediocrity and from the stress- 
ing of the legislative at the expense of the executive 
branch of the government. Both these results are 
likely to follow from the effective appearance of 
minority interests in Congress. 



25 



225 



CHAPTER XII 

THE HAPPY ENDING 

I HAVE hesitated a long time over writing this 
last chapter, because of the natural desire to give 
to my book a happy ending. 

One may write critically of America and things 
American, but only if one ends in a mood of hope- 
ful confidence. There is so much youth, so much 
latent power here, that one cannot fail to have 
faith that the spirit of man will gain some enlarge- 
ment from the experiment in living which we are 
carrying on in this country. 

And even if that were not true, egotism requires 
us to believe that we are ever going forward to 
better things ; for how should ' ' the forces " have the 
effrontery to establish so splendid a people as our- 
selves upon so rich a continent, while reserving 
for us nothing but a commonplace career, that of 
one of the many peoples who have from time to 
time occupied the fairer regions of the earth? 

At least we shall fill a place in history alongside 
Greece and Rome; we feel it as the imaginative 

226 



THE HAPPY ENDING 

young man feels in himself the stirrings of a future 
Shakespeare, Napoleon, or Lincoln. 

The human mind refuses to conceive of so much 
power coming to ordinary ends. The justice illu- 
sion which men have found so indispensable a 
companion on their way through time requires 
the happy ending. As it is only right and fair that 
when the forces send us a crisis they should send us 
a man equal to it, so it is only right and fair that 
when they put so great a people as ourselves in the 
world they should prepare for it a splendid destiny. 

I subscribe heartily to this doctrine. It is as 
convincing as any I have ever seen based on the 
theory which we all cheerfully accept, that man is 
not master of his own fate, that he does not need to 
be, that he had better not be, that he reaps where he 
does not sow, reaps, indeed, abundant crops. 

In the preceding chapter, working toward the 
happy ending, I have brought my characters to 
the verge of felicity: the perfect imion between 
minorities and majorities, which is the aim of all 
social order, is in sight. 

I have based my minorities upon self-interest, 
thus introducing into our government the selfish 
interests banished therefrom twenty years ago. 
Their banishment was an achievement of virtue. 
Their reintroduction is the accomplishment of 
good sense. They are the great reality while the 
world thinks as it does. 

Since someone somewhere, in a treatise on 

227 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

economics probably, penned the phrase "enhght- 
ened self-interest, " we have all more or less become 
enamored of the idea that wisdom — enlighten- 
ment — reposes in the bosom of selfishness. Justice 
requires that wisdom should be somewhere. The 
reasoning runs like this. The world cannot get 
on without wisdom. Justice demands that the 
world should get on. Therefore there is wisdom in 
the world. We know it is not in ourselves or in our 
neighbors. We feel, therefore, that it must be in 
the bosom of perfect selfishness. And as we cast 
our eyes about us we think we know where the 
bosom of perfect selfishness is, and we feel assured. 

Sometimes, of course, we place it in the heads of 
all mankind, it being a thing that no one man has 
and no few men have, but which is one of those 
mysterious properties of the aggregate which does 
not inhere in the individuals composing the aggre- 
gate; a sort of colloidal element that comes from 
shaking men up together, though all are without it 
before the mixing and shaking. 

Some would place it, as Mr. Wilson seems to in 
a famous passage on minorities, in the breasts of 
the enlightened few. When the few disagreed with 
him, he threw them and their wisdom in jail. 

But wherever it is, it is sure to be foimd in a 
system which preserved the old parties represent- 
ing the general mind of the country along with the 
new vertical political organizations, representing 
the minorities, thrusting up like volcanoes upon the 

228 



THE HAPPY ENDING 

placid plane of politics that Mr. Harding once 
delighted to survey. 

You have in this combination the spontaneous 
wisdom of the masses, if that is where wisdom 
generates. You have the wisdom of the few, if you 
believe in impregnation from above, and you have 
the wisdom of selfishness, if you believe as most of 
us do in the enlightenment of self-interest. And 
no one ever located wisdom anywhere else than in 
these three places, for the first, as I might easily 
demonstrate, is the modern democratic name for 
the wisdom of God; the second is the wisdom of 
men; and the third is the wisdom of the serpent; 
beside which there are no other wisdoms. 

This you will admit is moving rapidly and with- 
out reserve toward the happy ending. But I think 
every writer of a novel has stuck his tongue in his 
cheek as he wrote those benedictory words," And 
they lived happy ever after." And I stick my 
tongue in my cheek as I think of Mr. Gray Silver, 
the effective director of the farmers' vertical politi- 
cal trust sitting in the Senate, leading it perhaps 
in place of Senator Lodge of Massachusetts. 

To Mr. Lodge's petulant, imperious gesture — 
the sharp handclap for the pages — would succeed 
Mr. Silver's fixing gesture, that of a country 
merchant smoothing out a piece of silk before a 
customer at a counter. Mr. Silver as he talks 
performs one constant motion, a gentle slow moving 
of both hands horizontally, palms down. 

229 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Mr. Silver is a lobbyist with the powers of a 
dictator, or a dictator with the habits of a lobbyist, 
whichever way you wish to look at it. A former 
farmer, member of the West Virginia legislature, 
representative of farm organizations at Washington, 
he rules the Senate with more power than Mr. 
Lodge has or Mr. Harding has, but always with 
the gentle touch of a general-storekeeper, spread- 
ing the wrinkles out of a yard of satin. 

But even this little lobbyist has a certain definite- 
ness which public men generally lack. His feet are 
firmly placed upon reality. He speaks for a solid 
body of opinion. He is a positive rather than a 
negative force. He represents a fairly imited 
minority which knows what it wants, and men 
are strong or weak according as they are or are not 
spokesmen of a cause ; and the selfish interest of a 
group easily takes on the pious aspect of a cause. 

It is always better to deal with principals than 
with agents. Gray Silver, Colonel John H. Taylor, 
the Apollo of the soldiers* bonus lobby, perfect 
ladies' man in appearance, who is full of zeal also 
for a cause, that of those who did not make money 
out of the war and who shoiild in common justice 
make it all the rest of their lives out of the peace, 
and Wayne B. Wheeler, the fanatic leader of the 
drys, are all more real men than those who do their 
bidding in the Senate and the House. 

No, if I put my tongue in my cheek as I write 
the words "lived happy ever after, " it is because 

230 



THE HAPPY ENDING 

I see only a measure of improvement in the freeing 
of men from existing political conventions which 
will comefrom the effective emergence of minorities. 
A richer public life will result from increased 
vitality of the legislative branch. But a rich public 
life, no ; for that requires men. You cannot fashion 
it out of Lodges, Watsons, Curtises, Gillettes, 
Mondells, Hardings, Hugheses, and Hoovers, or 
even Gray Silvers, Taylors, or Wheelers. 

And we do not breed men in this country. If the 
test of a civilization is an unusually high average of 
national comfort, achieved in a land of unparalleled 
resources, whose exploitation was cut off from 
interruption by foreign enemies, then this experi- 
ment in living which we have been conducting in 
America has been a great success ; if it is a further 
freeing of the human spirit, such as finds its ex- 
pression in the rare individuals who make up the 
bright spots in all past himian history, then its 
success is still to be achieved. 

Many blame the dullness and general average- 
ness which afflicts us upon democracy. There is 
democracy and there is timidity and stupidity; 
there is the appeal to low intelligence ; the compul- 
sion to be a best seller rests upon us all. Post hoc 
propter hoc. 

I am going to blame it upon the mistake Euclid 
made in his theorem about two parallel lines. 
This was an error of Euclid's, modem mathematics 
proves, unless you assume space to be infinite. 

231 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Having committed ourselves to Euclid, we com- 
mitted ourselves to a space that was infinite. 
Space being regarded as infinite, man was little, 
relatively. 

Euclid having made his mistake about the 
parallels, it followed inevitably that Mr. Harding 
should be little. 

I use Mr. Harding only by way of illustration. 
You may fill any other name you like of the Wash- 
ington gallery into that statement of inevitability 
and do it no violence. And this very interchange - 
ability of names suggests that you must go further 
back than democracy to find the cause of today's 
sterility. 

Besides, we have had infinite space, in our minds; 
but have we ever had democracy there? De Gour- 
mont writes that no religion ever dies, but it rather 
lives on in its successor. Similarly, no form of 
government ever dies; it stirvives in its successor. 
A nation does not become a democracy by writing 
on a bit of paper, "resolved that we are a democ- 
racy, with a government consisting of executive, 
legislative, and judicial branches chosen by 
majority vote." 

Government, however organized, is what exists 
in the minds of the people, and in that mind is 
stored up a dozen superstitions, handed down from 
primitive days, gathering force from time to time 
as new names are given to them and new "scien- 
tific" bases are found for them. 

232 



THE HAPPY ENDING 

We laugh at the divine right of kings, but we 
could not accept self-government without bestow- 
ing on it an element of divinity. We have the 
divine right of Public Opinion. We can hardly 
print these words without the reverence of capital 
letters. The founders of modern democracy knew 
there could be no government without a miraculous 
quality. Formerly one mere man by virtue of 
ruling became something divine. The miracle 
grew difficult to swallow. You could regard this 
one man and see that he was a fool and had too 
many mistresses. He was the least divine-looking 
thing that could be imagined. Very well then, put 
the divine quality into something remote. All 
men by virtue of ruling themselves became divine. 

An immense inertia develops between theoretical 
self-government and the practical reluctance of 
humanity to be governed by anything short of the 
heavenly hosts. I don't know whether this re- 
luctance springs from racial modesty, the feeling 
that man is not good enough to govern himself, or 
from racial egotism, the belief that nothing is too 
good to govern him ; but it is a great reality. The 
little men at Washington are will-less in the conflict. 

To overcome this inertia, minorities whose in- 
terests cannot wait upon the slow benevolent 
processes of determinism or upon the divine right- 
ness of public opinion, form to prod the constitu- 
tional organs of government into action. Mr. 
Gray Silver, the silk smoother, and Mr. Wayne B. 

233 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Wheeler, the Puritan fanatic, are both just as much 
parts of the government as is Mr. Harding. So, 
too, is every one of the himdred and more lobbies 
which issue publicity at Washington. We recog- 
nize this plurality of our institutions in our common 
speech. We refer habitually to the "invisible 
government," to "government by business," to 
"party government," to "government by public 
opinion." We have little but inertia, except as 
outside pressiu"e is applied to it. 

The little men at Washington live in all this 
confusion of an excessively plural government. 
They are pushed hither and yon by all these forces, 
organized and unorganized, mental and physical, 
real and imaginary, that inhibit and impel self- 
government. They lean heavily upon parties only 
to find parties bending beneath their weight. They 
yield to blocs and lobbies. They watch publicity 
and put out their own publicity to counteract it. 

Like the ministers of crowned fools, they gull the 
present embodiment of divine right and cringe 
before it. They are everything but the effective 
realization of a democratic will. 

All this sounds as if I were getting far from my 
happy ending, and you begin to see me asking the 
old question, "Is democracy a failure?" But no, 
it is too soon to ask it. Wait a thousand years 
until democracy has had a real chance. A revolu- 
tion — no really optimistic prognosis can be written 
which does not have the world revolution in it — a 

234 



THE HAPPY ENDING 

revolution will have to take place in men's minds 
before this is a democracy. 

I would absolve myself from the taboo of this 
word. Property is a grand form of clothes. A 
property revolution, such as the Socialists recom- 
mend, would be little more important in setting 
men's minds free for self-government, than would 
putting women in trousers be in setting women's 
minds free for the achievement of sex equality. 

Some German — I think it was Spengler — writing 
about some " Niedergang, " I think it was of 
western civilization — all Germans like to write 
about Niedergangs — demonstrated ^that every new 
civilization starts with a new theory of the universe, 
of space and time. That is, it starts with a real 
revolution. 

Well, then, here is the true happy ending; Ein- 
stein is giving us a new theory of the universe, 
knocking the mathematical props from under 
infinity, teaching us that man largely fashions the 
world out of his own mind. 

Man again tends to become what the old Greek 
radical called him, "The measure of all things." 
Once he is, and it will take a long time for him to 
admit that he is, there may be a real chance for 
democracy and for the emergence of great indi- 
viduals, who are after all the best evidence of 
civilization. 

You see the happy ending is Einstein and not 
the farm bloc. 

235 



BEHIND THE MIRRORS 

Meanwhile we have the farm bloc, one sign of 
vitaHty amid much deadness, a reassertion of the 
principle which the Fathers of the Constitution 
held, that there must be room for the play of 
minorities in our pohtical system. 



END 



236 



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The past third of a century has witnessed an interesting 
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have had a part in making or marring the progress of the 
nation. The period includes eight administrations and six 
Presidents, — Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Roosevelt, 
Taft, and Wilson. The last Chapter brings the text down 
to date with the entrance to the White House of President 
Harding. 

A refreshing feature of this work is the frankness with 
which the author has been able to write about statesmen 
and political parties. There is in his series of pictures 
evidence of neither fear nor favor and the book is free from 
partisanship. 



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